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5 Principles of Human-First Products

5 Principles of Human-First Products

As a COO, I’m always trying to figure out get a ton of things done in a short amount of time.

I’m constantly thinking about how to do more with less. The danger for someone like me is that when you give them technology, the standard for what counts as “efficient” dramatically increases.

Here’s what my typical work week looks like.

Screen Shot 2019 05 19 at 2.23.43 PM

Technology helps me pack my calendar to the brim: any empty 30-minute time slot is immediately visible and available for me to book. In the two minutes I might have in between meetings, I flip through my inbox to see how quickly I can get back to inbox zero and how many text messages I can respond to. The busy-ness is such a good sign that our teammates want to collaborate, that clients want to meet, that there’s opportunity. But the volume of communication is exorbitant. I’m playing a day-long game of whac-a-mole.

It takes its toll. By the time I’m at home, I am completely fried. My long-distance vision has declined because I spend most of my day staring at one or more screens, 12 inches from my face. I’m not as familiar with city neighborhoods, because when I’m in an Uber, I spend the time responding to emails. I am more forgetful than I used to be, because my brain operates in short-term memory as opposed to long-term storage.

I have my coping mechanisms. I don’t check email in the morning until I’ve read a book for ten minutes, so my mind is in a more focused state. As a general rule, I don’t check email after 7:30pm; if someone needs to reach me, they know to text or call. I spend Saturdays completely outdoors, usually hiking in the Marin Headlands across the Golden Gate Bridge.

As much as I try to protect myself against technology, I’m struggling. The problem is that when I’m living this way, I don’t feel completely human. I feel like I’m a slave to my technology.

Today, the treadmill of technology has eliminated every autonomous moment we experience, so that we rarely exercise the muscle of reflection. When we do have a spare moment of space, we fear it. A friend of mine said to me the other day, “I don’t want to pause and reflect, because it’s terrifying to imagine what I’d think about.”

Products today reinforce and take advantage of our basest emotions—especially feelings of inadequacy and fear of missing out or being left behind. They erode behaviors we once valued and that I would argue make us more human: independent thinking, deep consideration, and control over our actions. Products today don’t speak to our highest human nature. Technology has become first; humanity, second.

In March, my partner Scott and I planned a trip to celebrate his birthday. We decided to go “glamping,” which means glamorous camping. It involves sleeping outside in a tent, but with electricity. What’s fascinating is that you forget entirely that the technology is there, because it’s hidden in the background of nature. Our humanity comes first; technology is here for us when we need it, but it’s a servant to our higher interests.

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Scott and I spent the day discussing the deeper things in life while wandering through the forested hills. I even had a couple of breakthroughs about my work at Gainsight, which I never could have envisioned in the daily ritual of whac-a-mole. In this environment, humanity was first; technology, second.

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Technology-First Products

Software products today don’t fulfill this human-first standard. They don’t recognize the humans they should be supporting as independent thinkers. They instead refer to humans as “users,” as a large mass of units, perhaps distinguishing among them based on groupings, such as “persona” or their company’s size. These are users to be “activated” — like a machine — or “converted”—which sounds like religious conversion. The technology is supposedly the source of religious insight; the humans, mere recipients.

Products therefore come with a vision that says “people need to change,” but the product doesn’t facilitate that change. So a company buys a new product, and they look to roll it out, and the team struggles. As a group of naturally independent thinkers, these users are dumbstruck by the thought that they have to conform their entropic thinking to the mostly inflexible interface of today’s software—or else risk not performing in their jobs. They’re smart, so they’ll eventually figure out where to click and how this software might help them. But the act of conforming to software dehumanizes them. In a moment of independent thinking, one of these “users” might ask, “Why doesn’t the software conform to us?”

Our industry is so far from this ideal that thinking about this might generate feelings of cynicism among us. One might say: “We’re all trying to make money, after all—both the vendors and the buyers who want their teams to operate with greater efficiency.” That may be true, but I believe that in the future, the ability for both sides to make money will depend on the degree to which technology conforms to and reinforces the most elevated of human behaviors. What will matter in the future is the degree to which a product is “human-first.” And I believe that together, this community can help create a new era of human-first products.

What do I mean by a human-first product? I’d put forward 5 principles for how a product should view the humans it serves.

The 5 Principles

A human-first product should treat each human as:

  1. Growing: The product treats each human as having the raw material to improve their ways of working—but importantly, only if given time and coaching to master the new way, autonomy in how to do it, and clear alignment with a purpose.
  2. Special: The product treats each human as unique, with distinct beliefs, preferences, and motivations, not as an undifferentiated user. The product is inclusive of that specific human.
  3. Vulnerable: The product recognizes that a human can be abused by others who have their data on how they’re using a product. It therefore assumes by default that any data gathered is owned by the human who generated it, and offers meaningful ways to use the product without being forced to waive rights to privacy.
  4. Ends, Not Means: The product holds the humans it serves as ends in themselves (with technology as a means to their goals), taking their feedback seriously and adapting its approach accordingly.
  5. Autonomous: The product reinforces independent thinking and decision-making.

At Gainsight, we haven’t fulfilled these 5 principles. You might think that this post is hypocritical, but rather, it’s an admission of guilt. That said, I honestly can’t think of a single product that has fulfilled these principles. Our industry is not there yet. And it will probably take us a while—likely many years—to get there. To offer up a map to get us to that destination, I’d consider these 5 principles to be the 5 different stages of improving a product so that it becomes human-first.

The Path Forward

Screen Shot 2019 05 21 at 9.03.36 AM

Stage 1: Growing

Instead of expecting humans to adopt products instantaneously (“Go figure it out!”), let’s design the product’s UI itself so that it coaches people over time on how they can take advantage of it and why it helps them. A simple first step is for Customer Success and Product teams to work together to create in-app guides to walk users through new releases.

Stage 2: Special

Product teams should design ways to learn about what makes a person unique, and help create a correspondingly unique experience for them. Customer Success teams should have tools to visualize clients as more than accounts, but rather as collections of unique individuals who need to work together. The goal is to be inclusive of every client.

Stage 3: Vulnerable

At the same time, gathering tons of data on people makes them vulnerable. So Product Managers need to create unique experiences while honoring people’s need for privacy. And Customer Success Managers need to ensure that clients’ sensitivities are communicated well.

Stage 4: Ends, Not Means

Since technology is a means to a human’s ends, products should adapt to what that human needs. As a starting point, Product Managers need to create a 360-degree view of feedback from clients, and also learn about what clients need based on their adoption of the product. And CSMs can contribute their observations to that 360-degree view.

Stage 5: Autonomous

Finally, products should be a “pull,” not a “push.” Products should help clients test their own hypotheses, not merely push recommendations. And CSMs should ensure that the configuration that’s rolled out isn’t overly rigid.

For the sake of a more humane software industry, Customer Success and Product Management can come together to help our industry honor these principles, and even to come up with new principles as well. But there’s also a business reason for CS and Product to come together to design human-first products.

The Scaling Problem

Screen Shot 2019 05 14 at 3.34.59 PM

Last year, we surveyed 100 Customer Success leaders about the maturity of their organization on a number of different capabilities. The most difficult pain point was automating the customer journey. And I’ve personally heard from many of you, “I need to scale my team.” I’ve also said this about Gainsight’s Customer Success team. It’s worth us asking, what’s the root cause of that need to scale in CS?

Imagine a hypothetical conversation, where we ask ourselves “why” nine times:

“Why do you need to scale?”

“Because Customer Success isn’t a priority at my company.”

“Why are you saying it’s not a priority?”

“Because my CFO won’t give me more budget.”

“Why isn’t your current budget sufficient for helping your clients?”

“Because my CSMs have too many accounts.”

“Why is that account load too significant?”

“Because my CSMs are already working nights and weekends in answering client emails, hosting best-practice calls, conducting trainings, running EBRs.”

“Why do they need to do those things?”

“Well, because our clients need it.”

“But why do they need tons of email responses, calls, trainings, etc.?”

“Well…because that’s what it takes to enable adoption of our product.”

“Why is your product hard to adopt?”

“Well, because…well, we released this new feature recently, and it was half-baked. So we had a slew of calls with clients about that. We also have a backlog of enhancement requests, and it means we have to do this work-around for our clients, which takes some time.”

“Why aren’t you solving the product gaps?”

“Umm… Well, that would be great. But it’s not my responsibility. That’s up to the Product team”

“I thought you said your responsibility was to scale?”

“Right… Well, I guess it’s a shared responsibility.”

“Sounds like you and your Product leader should set up a meeting.”

“Interesting.”

We have a massive scaling problem in our industry because we’re not designing human-first products.

This is an ethical problem. It’s also a business problem.

Human-First at Gainsight

At Gainsight, we haven’t solved this problem yet. But I’ll call out a few ways in which we’re trying, which may inspire others to do the same.

The typical CSM spends their day primarily in the thick of trying to enable Principle #1, Growing. For most products, there is a gap between what the product does out of the box, and what the client instinctively hopes it will do. That gap is filled by the CSM, who tries to help these poor people figure out what to do with this software that doesn’t guide them on how to benefit. The CSM can often help, but truly, they are filling a gap—a change management gap—that should be filled by the product itself. A human-first technology would do that.

At Gainsight, we’re looking to live up to the standard of human-first technology by recognizing our clients as “growing” humans. We’ve heard from you that getting value from Gainsight requires managing your teams through change, and we want to make that easier. So for the first time, when you implement Gainsight or roll out changes to your configuration, you’ll be able to guide your team members along their journey—through a new product that we’re calling Enablement Engine. It also helps you coach your CSMs on preparing for EBRs or contributing to a new internal initiative. Enablement Engine is already available to a number of Gainsight clients and will be available broadly in August. It’s a small change, but it’s a step we need to take to live up to the principles of human-first technology. (You can learn more about Enablement Engine and best practices for scaling your CSM team here.)

Screen Shot 2019 05 19 at 2.25.15 PM

And, if you’d like to guide your own clients through the meaningful change that comes with using a new product or feature, you can learn more about Gainsight PX here.

For the first time ever at Pulse, we’re excited today to bring together Product leaders and Customer Success leaders in the same conference. There is an enormous opportunity for the Product leaders here to build products that guide people through a journey from fear and confusion to success. There’s also an opportunity for Customer Success leaders, who are staffing teams to break down the barriers between human and machine. Perhaps this will be the start of a new era, in which Customer Success and Product Management join together to deliver technology that is human-first.

If I can leave you with one thing, it would be the feeling you have when you’re walking through the woods. The clarity of thought. The freedom. The empowerment.

What if every product experience could be like a wondrous hike through the woods?

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  • May 22, 2019
  • Allison Pickens
  • 2 Comments
  • Best Practices, _Top Posts

Recap: Customer Success at SaaStr

I had a great time at SaaStr this week.

I hosted a panel on “How to Take Customer Success from Idea to Action” with three incredible customer success leaders: Ashley Fryar (VP of Customer Success at NAVEX Global), Bernie Kassar (Chief Customer Officer at Xactly), and Mary Poppen (Chief Customer Officer at Glint). In case you missed it, here were the takeaways.

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To set the context for the discussion, we referred to a framework, created by David Skok of Matrix Partners, to describe the life of a startup, with three stages:

  • Stage 1: The Search for Product-Market Fit
  • Stage 2: The Search for a Repeatable Growth Model
  • Stage 3: Scaling the Business

Screen Shot 2019 02 07 at 8.37.42 PM

In my mind, the stages of customer success for a SaaS product directly mirror those.

  • In Stage 1, we’re figuring out the “whole product,” which inevitably includes not just product features but also human intervention. Very few products deliver value 100% “out of the box”—help from a person is required. That’s where customer success comes in.
  • In Stage 2, we’re figuring out what’s the right model for customer success in my business.
  • In Stage 3, we’re executing that model at scale.

Here’s the panel’s guidance on how to tackle each of those stages:

Stage 1: “Figuring Out Your Whole Product”

  • Hire Customer Success Managers that complement your product. Bernie talked about how his CSMs at Xactly are focused on training (to drive adoption) because they can rely on a professional services team or a system integrator to handle the initial implementation, whereas his former team at Mixpanel was technical and product savvy since their focus was onboarding and ongoing adoption. If your product has gaps, hire technical CSMs who can create hacks to fill those gaps and then communicate feedback to your Product team; I like to call that role “CSM of the gaps.”
  • Hire a VP who complements your product. Mary explained that if the product doesn’t obviously communicate value to an executive at your client, you’ll need a VP who can align with that exec and explain the value.
  • If you have multiple products, you’ll need CSMs who can serve as quarterbacks for your clients to help them navigate through the maze of your company. Ashley talked about how NAVEX’s series of acquisitions motivated her and the company to create a Customer Success team to help clients work more smoothly with their business and to cross-sell products into white space in the combined client base.

Stage 2: “Finding the Right Model”

  • Create a thorough process for diagnosing churn. Avoid the temptation to sweep churn under the carpet by pointing to “uncontrollable factors” (which are often cited to be sponsor change, client pivot, or loss to a competitor). Churn can always teach you how to execute better. Mary talked about the importance of sharing those learnings across your company, so that each department can act on the feedback. Improving gross retention takes a village.
  • Pause before abandoning your SMBs. If you have churn in your small business segment, don’t skip to the conclusion that your should abandon that segment and “move upmarket.” I’ve seen teams improve their gross retention rate in their small business segment by 20 percentage points by investing at the right levels and improving execution.
  • Invest appropriately in Customer Success. Studies show that SaaS companies invest between 10 and 15 cents per dollar of renewal, depending on the year of the survey. You should see the impact of this investment on metrics such as gross retention, net retention, NPS, and adoption. You can justify investing more in customer success to your CFO by taking on a higher gross retention target, and funding the headcount from that GRR improvement.

Stage 3: “Executing at Scale”

  • Services help your software business. Founders of SaaS companies often shudder at the idea of selling services. (“After all, I’m a software person!”) But services can help you cover the cost of offering your clients much needed help from your team—and thereby boost your subscription metrics. Ashley shared that her Finance teams did an analysis that showed that net retention improved dramatically when a client purchased services. Use the metric Attach Rate (dollars of services bookings per dollar of subscription bookings) and refer to industry benchmarks to assess whether you’re selling the right amount of services.
  • Reduce effort in your product. Even as we’re taking for granted that clients often need help from people, invest in reducing the effort that your product requires (from your clients and your own team) to generate value. Create systems between your Product team and your Customer Success team, such as shared adoption metrics. Bernie also discussed the importance of defining processes for how Product and CS should work together to automate more.

We ended with the age-old question, “Who should own renewals, Sales or Customer Success?” Bernie and Mary advocated for Customer Success, but Ashley responded, “No comment”—further proof that we’ll never come to consensus. We’ll try again at the Pulse conference in May!

  • February 11, 2019
  • Allison Pickens
  • No Comments
  • Best Practices, _Customer Success, _Top Posts

CSMs: Are they COGS or Sales & Marketing?

CSMs Are they COGS

I hear these two questions in the Customer Success community all the time:

  1. What profile of Customer Success Manager (CSM) should I hire?
  2. Does CSM count as Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) or Sales & Marketing?  

These two questions are fundamentally related. The key to answering them is figuring out which of three categories you fall into:

1. “CSM for Value Gaps”

Because it’s early days, your product doesn’t deliver enough value out of the box, so your CSM fills the gaps. They’re highly technical and create (sometimes ingenious) hacks to solve problems. Theoretically, this type of CSM could be charged for as a service, but your clients aren’t willing to pay (so you need to invest the work as free), or else you haven’t had the time or expertise to develop a services program yet. Over time, you may figure out how to package up this role as a paid recurring Technical Account Management (TAM) service. You categorize your CSM expense as COGS because the CSM is essential to delivering the product that the client purchased.

As your CSM creates hacks, your clients may accumulate tech debt. Your board is unhappy that you are asking for so much headcount (especially because it detracts from your Gross Margin) and tell you that you should find a scalable solution through the product (more on that here). But your clients are getting value and renew at an acceptable rate.

2. “CSM for Value Delivery”

Your product has evolved. The gaps are no longer large, and you’ve figured out how to plug the remaining ones by selling services to offset the cost of extra work that your team needs to do (and you specialize that work into a Services team). You realize that delivering value isn’t just about getting feature adoption; it’s also about managing client teams through the changes in behavior that the software prescribes. To achieve this, the CSM must build trust, reconcile different points of view in meetings at the client, communicate persuasively, mobilize the group behind a plan, and gain the respect of executives, who are often the decision-makers for renewing the product. You hire CSMs for their interpersonal skills. You focus them on a certain “lifecycle” of activities: kickoffs, milestone meetings, executive business reviews, and renewal conversations.

Your retention rates improve and your Sales team is happy because they can focus less of their time on escalations and more on hunting and expanding existing accounts. The CSMs count toward Cost of Retention (part of Sales & Marketing) since they contribute to the renewal, even if they don’t have formal quota responsibility.

3. “CSM for Value Capture”

You have a strong methodology for delivering value to clients through your product (which may be very simple or intuitive) and/or through services (which are essential if the product is complex). Your CSMs are focused on monetizing the value that you’re delivering (by upgrading clients to a new tier), selling into white space, by pitching new use cases, finding new teams to sell to, or selling new products. The CSMs’ skills lie in exploiting opportunities: overages, white space, and organizational dynamics or politics. You hire CSMs who enjoy building long-term relationships and getting deals done. They have a quota and may have the title Account Manager. They count toward Cost of Expansion.

One of these three models isn’t necessarily better than the others; your choice depends on your situation. Choose wisely!

CSM Table

I encourage you to listen to a webinar I recorded alongside our CFO and CIO in which we answered listener questions about budgeting for Customer Success in 2019. It contains a lot of helpful ways to think about your CSM strategy and spend. Click here to watch the webinar.

  • December 21, 2018
  • Allison Pickens
  • 1 Comment
  • Best Practices, _Customer Success, _Top Posts

Gainsight Just Acquired Aptrinsic: Here’s What’s Next

Gainsight Just Acquired Aptrinsic: Here’s What’s Next

It’s been three weeks since we acquired Aptrinsic, and we’re just now getting our heads above the waves of conversations and opportunities that the announcement spurred. One question that surfaced a number of times: as a company that’s branded around Customer Success, what is Gainsight doing to preserve Aptrinsic’s high velocity and orientation towards Product?

The question behind the question is: “The Aptrinsic product, team, and message resonates with me. Is that going to change now that they’re part of Gainsight?”

No, it’s not. In fact, we chose Aptrinsic because their product, team, and message is something we want to amplify, not change.

As we completed our due diligence on Aptrinsic, we were blown away by the quality of their team and product. It is a lean group of high achievers:

  • Engineering and Product team members average over 10 years of relevant experience, carry deep domain knowledge, and have followed Mickey through multiple companies.
  • Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success have found viral traction in just a year in-market.

This is a team that’s kicking butt. We’re excited to double down on that. While Gainsight and Aptrinsic both see an opportunity for something greater by coming together, we’re keeping the teams structured in a way that the encourages the same agility and agency that got Aptrinsic to where it is today.

What we’re doing:

  • Hire, across the board. As soon as the Aptrinsic acquisition was announced, we opened 17 headcount in roles across Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Product, and Engineering. The current Aptrinsic team is helping to lead this hiring effort. You can see the postings here.
  • Listen to the Aptrinsic team (about the buyer, market, technology). We know Customer Success really, really well. But when it comes to Product Management, the Aptrinsic team are the experts. They will lead our strategy and message to the Product world.
  • Encourage startup mentality. From Day 1, it’s been a top priority that Aptrinsic stays the fast moving, innovative team that it is. We intend to keep it that way.
  • Commit to Aptrinsic’s existing customer base and prospects. We’re excited to market and sell Aptrinsic as a standalone product and drive success for it’s existing install base, including its free tier. Product teams will continue to be a primary focus.
  • Invest in the right product integrations. As a multi-product company, we’re excited to develop seamless integrations between both Gainsight and Aptrinsic.

What we’re not doing:

  • We’re not changing the team. Every employee from Aptrinsic has a home at Gainsight. The people are incredibly important to us, and each team will be getting a major injection of resources to supercharge their efforts.
  • We’re not disrupting product development. Mickey, formerly the CEO at Aptrinsic, is now the CTO of Aptrinsic at Gainsight. The team has continued to ship releases on their regular cadence.
  • We’re not changing the product strategy. The words used in market messaging may change, but the mission of the product will remain the same. You’re product is your most efficient growth engine, and Aptrinsic is the platform to make it a reality.

We’re excited for what the future holds with Aptrinsic, and hope that you are too.

  • November 11, 2018
  • Will Robins
  • 1 Comment
  • Best Practices, Product Experience

How to Build Human-First Products

How to Build Human First Products

Today we announced that Gainsight is acquiring Aptrinsic.

I couldn’t be more excited to start working closely with Aptrinsic’s CEO and co-founder Mickey Alon. I’ve come to respect Mickey deeply as a thought leader, and his vision for how to help his customers is very aligned with ours. In this post I’ll share the “why” behind this acquisition, which gets to the root of Customer Success philosophy. It may even challenge us to think differently about what Customer Success is really all about.

Ask Why

“I need to scale.”

This is a statement I’ve made myself, and that I’ve heard many times over the years from Chief Customer Officers and their teams. It’s such a common refrain at this point that we take for granted that the need to scale is a central responsibility in the CCO role. But perhaps it would be worth our time to ask, “Why?” And to ask it again, and again, and again.

Let’s play devil’s advocate with ourselves.

“Why do you need to scale?”

“Because CS isn’t a priority at my company.”

“Why are you saying it’s not a priority?”

“Because my CFO won’t give me more budget.”

“Why isn’t your current budget sufficient for helping your clients?”

“Because my CSMs have too many accounts.”

“Why is that account load too significant?”

“Because my CSMs are already working nights and weekends in answering customer emails, hosting best-practice calls, conducting trainings, running EBRs.”

“Why do they need to do those things?”

“Well, because our customers need it.”

“But why do they need tons of email responses, calls, trainings, etc.?”

“Well…because that’s what it takes to enable adoption of our product.”

“Why is your product hard to adopt?”

“Well, because…well, we released this new feature recently, and it was half-baked. So we had a slew of calls with customers about that. We also have a backlog of enhancement requests, and it means we have to do this work-around for our customers, which takes some time.”

“Why aren’t you solving the product gaps?”

“Umm… Well, that would be great. But it’s not my responsibility. That’s up to the Product team”

“I thought you said your responsibility was to scale?”

“Right… Well, I guess it’s a shared responsibility.”

“Sounds like you need to have a conversation with your Product leader.”

Interesting.

Customer Success and Product Management Operate in Silos

I think a lot of us in Customer Success want to have conversations with our Product leaders. I’m sure these conversations happen. But they often don’t result in anything meaningful.

That’s because—until today—Customer Success and Product have had no common framework for having conversations. They operate in entirely different worlds. They speak different languages—because they have different data sets.

As much as I’d like to say that we’re perfect at Gainsight, we too have struggled with the problem of silos. A while ago, our Customer Success team launched revised Scorecards for Adoption. We called them Adoption-Breadth (capturing diversity of feature usage) and Adoption-Depth (capturing the degree to which individual users were using the product). We presented them in an executive team meeting, only to hear from the Product team that they were already using their own definitions of Breadth and Depth. We had no idea. Each team was well-intentioned, trying to achieve similar goals. It wasn’t the Product team’s fault. It wasn’t the Customer Success team’s fault, either. The problem was that we weren’t coordinated.

The “CSM of the Gaps” Theory

Lots of people talk about AI and automation—claiming that jobs are being replaced by software. But the reality in the software industry is that Customer Success is often plugging the gaps that products should fill themselves.

When we approach Customer Success with a “CSM of the gaps” philosophy (as others before me have called it), we paper over the root causes that another team is better equipped to solve. We shield them from the information they need to make better decisions. The only data point that the Product leader sees, likely in strategic planning sessions, is that the true cost of CSM is too high—which at first glance looks more like an execution problem that a Customer Success leader should solve with the CFO’s active monitoring.

The other problem with a “CSM of the gaps” approach is that it puts CSM in the COGS bucket—since CSM becomes an essential team to deliver on what you sold. And that means investing in “CSM of the gaps” is terrible for our gross margins. You can’t go public with margins like that.

Imagine a different paradigm. CSMs are entirely free to work on activities that a product can’t solve for: aligning client stakeholders, proposing a success plan, enabling change management. Imagine also that the CSMs are free to facilitate faster expansion, and convert clients to talkative advocates.

In this paradigm, clients are happier and getting more value. The CSMs also are removed from COGS into Sales & Marketing expense—which means better Gross Margins, and a better investment of that expense. CSMs are driving revenue according to the Helix model.

This paradigm only exists in a world where Customer Success and Product Management are aligned on how to solve the problem of scaling.

How to Scale—Together

Back in April, we unveiled the Periodic Table of Customer Success Elements. The goal was to create a simple framework, supported by data and depth of best practices, to help our clients grow the maturity of their Customer Success organization.

Elements are Gainsight’s “solutions.” Each one represents a business objective that companies are looking to solve. And the Gainsight platform is built to solve them.

But we knew that we had some feature gaps. So we conducted dozens of interviews and surveyed our clients to understand what other features they were hoping that Gainsight would provide, to better achieve the Elements goals.

We found that our clients were super interested in the Tech Touch Element (Tt). We also found that maturity across the broader Customer Success industry in Tech Touch, based on self-assessments, was lower than any other Element. Which is consistent with the trend that Customer Success leaders are concerned about the problem of scaling.

We heard that our clients wanted us to enable them to create in-app workflows and in-app surveys, so they could have additional Tech Touch tools besides email, and drive communications from within the product itself, directly where users live.

Our clients also said they wanted to track usage data more effectively, with the goal of aligning with their Product teams on a “source of truth” for how clients are adopting the product—as well as align on what that data implied for product roadmap decisions.

Our clients said loud and clear, “We want to work more effectively with our Product teams. We want to scale from within the product, and we want to influence how the product helps us scale in the future.”

Then we found Aptrinsic.

Aptrinsic essentially “activates” the product as a new channel through which we can generate powerful insights and personalized engagements. Aptrinsic’s features will help with many Elements—among them, Tech Touch (Tt), Adoption Management (Am), Expansion Management (Em), Advocate Engagement (Ae), Experience Health (Cx), and Product Success (Pr).

Do you want to scale?

You don’t have to lead the scaling effort by yourself. Talk to your Gainsight team member or contact us here about how we can help you partner with your Product team.

On a Philosophical Note

Closer collaboration between Customer Success and Product Management will help us get one step closer to scaling our CS teams through better products. But there’s a more meaningful result that can stem from this collaboration. I wrote the following in a recent post on Servant Leadership:

“There’s a particularly strong purpose in Customer Success. How humans interact with technology is a fundamental question of our time. Software is eating the world, robots are more capable than ever, and AI can replicate at least some human capabilities. Interestingly, Customer Success Managers are at the forefront of human-machine interaction in the business world. When software has bad UI, when it’s imposed top-down, or when it’s not natural to adopt, the CSM is on the front lines, empathizing with the poor human being who’s struggling to use the software. It’s the CSM’s job to break down the barrier between human and machine, in a way that’s human-first. To me, serving that purpose is among the most valuable causes we can contribute to in our lifetimes.”

What if Customer Success could help us develop software from the start that is human-first?

Read Our CEO, Nick’s Post on the Aptrinsic Acquisition

  • October 22, 2018
  • Allison Pickens
  • No Comments
  • Best Practices, Product Experience, _Top Posts

Servant Leadership: A 4-Step Playbook

Servant Leadership A 4-Step Playbook

From the time I was little, my dad shared stories with my brother and me about heroes.

There was a story about how the Wright Brothers, two little-known bicycle mechanics who worked tirelessly on their flight experiments for years, were greeted in France by unfamiliar praise from crowds of admirers of their innovation. There was another story about how Roosevelt secretly sent aid to the British before the U.S. entered World War II, even when faced with political opposition to getting involved, because it was the right thing to do. There were other stories that my dad made up at bedtime, sitting in the hallway between my and my brother’s respective bedrooms, about heroic kids who saved the day. The stories varied, but a central character recurred: a leader with a vision to humbly serve others. A servant leader.

Nowadays, I don’t hear many stories about servant leadership in the media. I could go on about the very different narratives of leadership that are told nowadays—carrying themes like narcissism, greed, materialism, workaholism, sociopathy, mental illness, and others—but those have been well documented elsewhere.

I think we need more compelling stories of leadership in our lives. We need to know what to expect from our leaders, and as we grow in our careers, we need to know what to aspire to, and how to get there. We need more inspiration in general.

Servant leadership is the idea that leaders serve their teams rather than teams serving their leaders. Leaders don’t sit at the top of the pyramid; they invert the pyramid, empowering everyone else. The concept was created by Robert Greenleaf and described more here. (There are parallels to the concepts in Multipliers.)

Screen Shot 2018 09 30 at 7.03.56 PM

I’ve witnessed and heard many stories of servant leadership among managers at Gainsight. Among them:

  • Whenever Nadav, our Director of Enterprise CSM, wants his team members to try out a new motion to help our clients, he performs the motion himself first. This shows his team what’s possible and trains them on how to do it. Nadav has traveled literally around the world (multiple times) to support his team in this way.
  • I was in a meeting with Daniel, our Manager of Solution Architects, where we were discussing work-life balance for the team, which at the time wasn’t great. Daniel took a stand in saying that he believes managers should formally take responsibility for their team’s work-life balance, in the same way they are responsible for operational results.
  • Elaine, a thought leader in our Education team, led a session to document how to thoughtfully manage our teams through change, a permanent aspect of our lives at a growth-stage company.

To some, these activities might seem small. But imagine the world we’d live in if every action stemmed from a philosophy of servant leadership.

That’s not to say leaders on our team don’t make mistakes. I personally have made plenty of them. Sometimes we make mistakes due to our emotional state: we’re stressed, threatened, or otherwise in pain. Sometimes we make mistakes because we don’t have the right knowledge: it takes experience, creative thinking, and solid judgment to arrive at a win-win-win in any given particular situation. In either case, our intentions aren’t bad, but our actions are.

I think most people want to help others. Even if they’re not aware of their desire to serve right now, they’ll likely discover it later in life. And perhaps some inspiration would help—which is my goal in launching the Be Brave video series soon.

Hear the story behind “Be Brave” in Allison’s keynote from Pulse 2018

But an important root of the problem is that even when people want to serve, they don’t know how. Servant leadership isn’t merely about wanting to help; it’s about taking actions that are effective in helping.

We need a playbook for how to be a servant leader in the context of a growing company. You’ve committed to your investors to achieve high targets; you know that change is a necessary constant; you need to do more with less. All of these factors make it difficult to serve your team.

In the spirit of creating this playbook together, I’ll share a few frameworks that I’ve found helpful in trying to be a servant leader myself. You’ve probably discovered your own frameworks—and I’d love for you to reply to this post with your ideas. I’m learning every day.

The frameworks I discuss here are:

  1. Growth Mindset: Be a role model to your team by showing them that even leaders need to grow.
  2. Purpose: Grow with a purpose in mind.
  3. Energy: Help your teammates thrive.
  4. Self-Compassion: Be there for yourself so you can be there for your team.

Growth Mindset

In my view, no one is ever done growing. When we stop growing, we die inside. That’s true for leaders as well as team members. Leaders should role-model this growth mindset, so that team members emulate them, and so that team members can support them in their own progression.

Every year or so, I create a professional growth plan for myself and share it with my entire team in an All Hands. I share feedback I’ve received from across my organization, and then share behaviors that I’m going to Keep Doing, Stop Doing, and Start Doing.

I’ve found the team really appreciates this. They know I’m not perfect, and they are grateful that I recognize it, too. They appreciate that I’m working on responding to their feedback, and even want to help me in my own growth. They sometimes even see it as courageous for me to be vulnerable with them.

For example, one anonymous comment from a teammate in my 360-degree review this year was, “Allison sometimes reacts to being blindsided.” It referred to a couple of situations where I wasn’t adequately prepared for a client meeting, and I communicated with too much frustration about it after the meeting. Talking about this feedback with my team gave us an opportunity to grow closer. I talked about how much pressure I put on myself to lead client meetings super effectively, and that when I’m unprepared, it feels like being thrown on stage to act in a play, but without the script, and expected to “perform.” My team and I talked about how I can respond more calmly in situations where I’m blindsided and how together we can improve our process for preparing me for client meetings. The team was happy to help—they want to set me up for success.

If we can “grow in public,” our teams will be more likely to grow, too.

Purpose

Much has been written about how people want purpose in their work. They’re not always inspired by the numbers, by operational initiatives, or by short-term wins. They want to feel they are contributing to a broader purpose. It’s the job of a servant leader to illuminate that purpose.

There’s a particularly strong purpose in Customer Success. How humans interact with technology is a fundamental question of our time. Software is eating the world, robots are more capable than ever, and AI can replicate at least some human capabilities. Interestingly, Customer Success Managers are at the forefront of human-machine interaction in the business world. When software has bad UI, when it’s imposed top-down, or when it’s not natural to adopt, the CSM is on the front lines, empathizing with the poor human being who’s struggling to use the software. It’s the CSM’s job to break down the barrier between human and machine, in a way that’s human-first. To me, serving that purpose is among the most valuable causes we can contribute to in our lifetimes.

Team members don’t just want a purpose to follow; they also want to see that their leaders are motivated by a broader purpose. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my purpose in my work, particularly since earlier in life, I had no intention of entering the software industry, and since as a student of moral philosophy in college, I spend a lot of time (too much time?) reflecting on more existential questions.

A couple months ago, Prakash Raman, an executive coach, joined an offsite that I was hosting for my extended leadership team. He posed a question to us: When you’re on your deathbed, what do you want your legacy to be?

For me, it’s pretty simple:

  1. I want to have built meaningful relationships with my family and others who I am close with.
  2. I want to have followed the ethical precepts that I hold dear, every step of the way. (The means matter, not just the end.)
  3. I want to have built communities that inspire others to create a more ethical world. (Servant leadership is fundamental to this one.)

If we as leaders can be open in sharing with our teams what we hope our legacy will be, and helping them define their own desired legacies, our teams will feel a whole new level of inspiration in their work.

Energy

A few years ago, a leadership coach shared with our exec team a personality framework called the 5 Dynamics. It’s in the realm of Myers Briggs and the Enneagram, except it focuses on the energy that you derive or expend when performing four different activities at work. Those activities are:

  • Explore: brainstorm, create, pursue breadth
  • Excite: inspire, motivate, build relationships
  • Examine: analyze, probe, become an expert
  • Execute: take action, “GSD”

If you derive energy from the activity (you’re flowing when you do it), you’ll place a star on the outer part of the corresponding axis. If you have to expend energy from the activity (you’re forcing yourself to do it), you’ll place a star on the inner part.

Screen Shot 2018 09 30 at 7.14.01 PM

I’m not certified in the 5 Dynamics, and I’m certain that my own re-interpretation of the framework above has departed from the original. But I’ve found the framework invaluable in illuminating how to help my team members define their roles in a way that maximizes their energy, how to create teams of people that complement each other so that every activity is performed by someone who is energized by it, and how to quickly get to know candidates I’m recruiting. (I’ve used this framework in literally hundreds of interviews, and candidates love it.)

Servant leaders know how to empower every team member—and that means putting them in situations where they are highly energized.

Self-Compassion

It’s hard to serve others when you’re not serving yourself. You can recognize a burnt-out leader by their emotional volatility, reactive decision-making, reluctance to work through conflict, or inability to feel empathy for others. When leaders burn out, their pain cascades through the entire team.

So it’s critical that leaders serve themselves, too. That means figuring out how to optimize your own energy level throughout the week. Over the years I’ve developed a weekly schedule that I’m laser-focused on maintaining. Here’s what it looks like:

Screen Shot 2018 09 30 at 7.16.42 PM

I start my work week with a few hours of work on Sunday afternoon/evening to prepare for the week: set priorities, write my weekly update to the company, return to “inbox zero”, and think deeply about certain topics (or write a blog post, as I am doing right now). Although I don’t love that it cuts my weekend short, I am in a much better state coming into our Monday morning executive team meeting when I feel prepared.

I follow a rule to be in bed at 9:30 p.m. and asleep at 10:00 p.m. every day (I can’t say I don’t make exceptions, but I’m pretty religious about this). I am a morning person, and I also am one of those unfortunate people who need eight hours of sleep. I wake up at 6:00 a.m. and refuse to check my email until I’ve gone through my morning routine of reading for 20 minutes and getting ready. Whenever I make an exception and check my email before I’ve completed the routine, it puts my mind in a scattered state for the rest of the day—whereas reading helps me focus, think bigger-picture, and tap into creativity.

I make a daily smoothie for myself that includes protein, fruit, and vegetables, which ensures that I get the nutrition I need from the start of the day. Before I adopted this habit, I’d repeatedly skip breakfast because I wouldn’t have time to eat it. Blending a smoothie takes one minute, and I can drink it while in meetings.

I start my first call (or check my email) starting at 7:00 a.m., and the rest of the day is back-to-back 15- or 30-minute meetings until 5:30 p.m. Then I check email for 30 minutes, and head to the gym. I block off time for the gym on my calendar every day, because for me, “sound body = sound mind.” On the way back from the gym, I check email again, and then from 7:30 p.m. onward, I do not check email. I want to be 100% present for my significant other. If someone needs an answer from me that night, they know they can call or text me, or else I’ll reply at 7:00 a.m. the next day. Again, I can’t say I never make exceptions, but the more closely I align to this schedule, the more energized I am.

We have a rule at Gainsight that we don’t send email on Saturdays, and for me, I’ve extended that to not working at all on Saturdays. I need a day when I can totally disconnect and focus on other parts of my life. I usually spend it outside in nature, hiking 10-15 miles through the Bay Area hills. Often I host a dinner or game night on Saturday night.

I spend my day trying to empower others—through coaching, persuading, comforting, reconciling, aligning—which, when effective, requires a great deal of emotional energy. To take care of others, I need to take care of myself.

***

I’m not quite the leader I want to be. I come home every day knowing that I could have handled a conversation better, that I could have communicated my intentions more effectively, that I could have achieved the same result in a better way. I’m not done growing. And hopefully, none of us are. It means we’re working harder to serve others.

If you’ve seen examples of servant leadership, I’d love to hear from you. What if we created the stories that we want to hear?

  • October 16, 2018
  • Allison Pickens
  • No Comments
  • Best Practices, _Top Posts

Gainsight Elements: The Science of Customer Success

Gainsight Elements: The Science of Customer Success

Let me take you back to when I was 10 years old.

Yup, I rocked those bangs.

I was also super shy. I had an A+ average, but my teachers told my parents that I never participated. I was a great athlete, but I was nervous to go to soccer camp because it meant I’d have to meet new people. I had a tight circle of close friends, but even they sometimes wondered aloud what I was thinking about when I had that dream-like expression on the playground, since I didn’t typically share what was on my mind. I was generally anxious, and settled for being known as the “nice” person.

But it didn’t feel good. I felt bottled up, untrue to myself. And that didn’t serve my friends or community.

Things changed when my parents saw my fourth grade report card. All the scores were high except for “Participation.” Thinking that I had a lot more to contribute, my parents encouraged me to visit a new school, which happened to be an all-girls school. I came home from a day-long visit and sobbed.

“Mom, the girls are so mean there!”
“What happened?”
“They are loud. They talk constantly. They’re scary.”
“It sounds like they’re not mean. They’re just strong. You can be nice and strong at the same time.”

That statement—that you can be nice and strong at the same time—was a revelation to me.

Over the next five years, I underwent one of the greatest journeys of my life. My fellow students—who were boisterous, assertive, and funny—became my role models. Following in their footsteps, I won awards at Model United Nations debate conferences, which basically favored the loudest public speaker. I became captain of my lacrosse team and gave them motivational speeches. I even choreographed a dance with our Athletic Association and volunteered to be the lead dancer, which meant embarrassment in front of the entire student population. But I loved it.

Today, even people who know me well would be surprised to hear that I was shy at one point. They know me as an extrovert, an advocate for her beliefs, and a regular party-organizer. And the person who’s pushing for a provocative new way of doing things, even if it seems unrealistic at first.

Folks who know me now would still describe me as “nice.” But the word “brave” comes up, too—which is a small point of pride for me, given how far I’ve come.

Being “Nice” to Your Clients

I share this story because I see many Customer Success Managers out there trying to be “nice” to their clients. The personality they’re aiming to portray is:

  • Good listener
  • Attentive
  • Receptive to feedback
  • Contagiously positive

That’s a problem.

Here’s the client journey that “nice” produces:

  • “I really like your team, so I bought your product.”
  • “Then they asked me, what do you want to do in the product?”
  • “I told them XYZ things. But to be honest with you, I had no idea if that was the right decision.”
  • “Your team never pushed back.”
  • “They kept asking me, what would you like to do next? I felt like I was the one pushing the process.”
  • “We still haven’t gotten value.”
  • “Truly what I wanted was for you to tell me what to do. You guys know best—I want to use the product the way your most successful clients do it.”
  • “But now since we’re starting from a blank slate, this really just seems like a ‘build’ exercise, and IT says they can do it.”
  • “My CFO is breathing down my neck about cutting costs, and I can’t defend this expense if I’m not getting value.”
  • “This isn’t personal, though. You have great people.”

That’s the excruciating sound of a customer that’s about to churn. Because your team was too “nice.” And I’ve definitely had my share of painful conversations with customers like this one. While I wish I could say that a customer has never churned at Gainsight, that’s unfortunately not the case.

Now let’s say you have a brave team. They’re brave like Katniss and Peeta from Hunger Games. They’re rearing to tell clients what to do. They want to be “prescriptive.”


<span=”font-size: xx-small;”>Credit: Lionsgate Films

But they don’t know what to say. What is the right thing to do? They need a point of view that they can advocate. How do we try to solve this problem at Gainsight?

Gainsight is an incredibly flexible platform. The beauty is that you can build almost any customer success workflow in it. But that’s also the challenge—you can build anything—including a workflow that isn’t valuable for your team.

That’s why we’re excited to unveil our prescriptive methodology, Customer Success Elements.

Elements are Gainsight’s Solutions. What do I mean by Solution? Gainsight has a terrific platform. But in general, our clients don’t think about product features first; they think about the business challenges they have to solve. We need Solutions in order to map our product features to clients’ objectives.

Each Element is a prescriptive approach for combining people, process, and the Gainsight platform to solve Customer Success business challenges.

The Elements reflect our tried and tested approaches to running a Customer Success team and working with hundreds of other Customer Success teams over the past five years.

The Elements approach takes a point of view. If you’re a client, expect to be challenged by us. We’re still going to listen well, learn about your objectives, gain an understanding of what makes you unique. And we’re still going to bring cupcakes to meetings sometimes. But we’re also going to push back when we think you’re on the wrong path. That’s because we want to make your team massively successful.

I couldn’t be more excited to tell you about Elements. Here’s the story.

The Customer Success Maturity Curve

The story begins with a Maturity Curve for Customer Success teams. We’ve identified four stages of Customer Success maturity, below:

Naturally, our goal at Gainsight is to help our clients progress from stage to stage. Many companies come to us in the Reactive stage — firefighting mode. We aim to help them progress to the Insights & Actions stage, in which the client develops a broad view of client data and then takes action based on signals detected in the data.

But CS teams don’t simply want to be reactive to data—they want to be proactive (and prescriptive!) in driving outcomes for their clients, which is what the Outcomes stage is all about.

And finally, in the Transform stage, our clients strive to achieve the pinnacle of Customer Success maturity: creating a client-centric company culture and operations, orienting every department around client health. They’re involving their Services, Support, Product, and Finance teams.

The Periodic Table of CS Elements

The question is: How do we help our clients progress from stage to stage?

The unit for progressing from stage to stage is an Element. As a recap, Elements are Solutions—our prescriptive, best-practice approach to combining people, process, and the Gainsight platform to drive success for your clients.

Below is the Periodic Table of Customer Success Elements. (Of course, at Gainsight, we can’t help but use a geeky chemistry term!) You’ll see that the last three stages from the Maturity Curve are the headers at the top of the Table. (We don’t have Elements for the Reactive stage, because that’s Stage 0.) When we start working with clients, we ensure they’ve executed the Elements in Insights & Actions (Stage 1), and then we move on to the Outcomes stage (Stage 2), and ultimately the Transformation stage (Stage 3).


The Insights & Actions stage involves four Elements that are focused on gathering data about clients and taking actions based on that data. For example, in the Experience Health (CX) Element, we’re aiming to visualize the health of client interactions across the company, and follow up on our knowledge of that health.

The Outcomes stage requires collaboration across multiple CS departments. For example, in the Renewal Management (RM) Element, we’re aiming to consistently execute on renewals and develop informed forecasts, leveraging a partnership between CSMs and Account Managers. In the Tech Touch (TT) Element, a CS Operations or one-to-many leader aims to scale up the touch points over the customer journey with automation, supplementing the activities that the CSMs are performing. In the Advocate Engagement (AE) Element, a Customer Marketing leader seeks to translate the strong client outcomes that the CSM team generates into advocacy activities, such as references, referrals, case studies, and online testimonials.

The Transform stage involves even broader collaboration across the company, in service of the client. In Services Experience (SE), for example, a Professional Services team aims to move beyond a focus on utilization and P&L targets, to driving strong outcomes and experiences in client engagements. In Product Success (PR), Customer Success and Product teams work together to prioritize clients’ enhancement requests.

You may not have to implement all Elements in the Periodic Table. We recommend prioritizing these based on your objectives. And for some teams, it may make sense to skip ahead to some Elements in the Transform stage. But in general, we do recommend starting on the left and moving toward the right. (More about the evidence behind that recommendation in a section below.)

Objectives Precede Features

Each of these Elements uses a combination of Gainsight product features to achieve its goal. For example, Experience Health (CX) uses Surveys to gather data, Scorecard Measures to display the meaning of the data, Calls to Action to ensure that CSMs follow up on the data, and Dashboards to monitor effectiveness. Renewal Management (RM) uses Calls to Action and Playbooks to ensure that Account Managers send out paperwork to the client at the right time, Scorecard Measures to show the likelihood to renew, and Dashboards to forecast renewals. Each Element contains specifications for how to configure these features according to best practice.

We’re deliberately taking the approach of leading with client objectives, and positioning our product features as “servants” of those objectives. Here’s why.

Clients come to us expecting a “Customer Success Home Renovation.” They’ve seen photos on Pinterest illustrating a gorgeous beach home. They want a brand new kitchen with state-of-the-art equipment, and a living room with modern furniture.

What Chief Customer Officers don’t care about is the hammer, the screwdriver, or the drill. They expect Gainsight to be the General Contractor, handling the details. They expect that we’re using the best available tools; they want to make sure their team (e.g. the Gainsight administrator) loves the tools and believes in them. But what matters to the CCO is the outcome that the tools produce—i.e. the Customer Success Renovation.

With this in mind, we’re leading with the objectives—i.e. the Elements—and explaining how features serve those Elements.

The Evidence behind the Elements

We designed these Elements based on our experience working with many of you. But we also wanted to confirm that there was empirical evidence that demonstrates the impact of these Elements. So at our CCO Summit in February, we gathered survey responses from 100 Customer Success leaders, from a range of companies:

We asked, what’s your progress with each of the objectives represented by the Elements (options: Non-existent, Manual, Semi-Automated, Optimized)?

We produced a grid for each respondent that can be visualized this way:

Then we grouped the respondents into the maturity stages, and we asked them for their Gross Retention Rate and Net Retention Rate. The results show a strong increase in Gross and Net Retention as companies progress along the Customer Success maturity curve.

Some Elements individually were strongly correlated with increases in GRR and NRR. For example, progressing from “Does Not Exist” to “Optimized” in the Adoption Management Element on average is correlated with a 9% increase in Gross Retention. Progressing through the levels for Success Planning is correlated with a 29% increase in Net Retention.

Gross Retention:

Net Retention:

While Retention Rate is the flagship metric for many Customer Success teams, Elements are already driving strong results in other metrics as well. Brittany Habel, the CS Operations Manager at ServiceTitan, saw a 28 point increase in NPS when they began to emphasize the Adoption Management (AM) Element both internally and externally. “It made it easy for customers to see how their adoption was trending and correct any downticks before it became a bigger issue. Product adoption improved as did customer happiness, and we were also perceived as much more of a partner.”

Ben Michael, the Sr. Manager of Customer Success at Jamf, stated that the Renewal Management (RM) Element “helped us scale our renewal process dramatically. We’ve increased our on-time renewals by 10% and each rep is able to handle 50% more renewals than before.”

In the future, we’ll be tracking the impact of Elements on our clients using an ROI Scorecard, as part of our own internal implementation of the CO (Outcomes Health) Element. Each Element has standard metrics that measure its ROI.

How We’re Using Elements Internally

The Periodic Table of CS Elements is not a “post-sales” concept. We’re using it across our entire company, so that our clients benefit from a consistent experience across their journey with us: from the time they find out about Gainsight, to when they visit our website, to when they speak with a sales person, to when they implement our product.

You might be looking to launch your own version of a Maturity Curve and “Periodic Table” to better serve your clients. When you do this, consider working with other departments to launch a company-wide initiative to ensure that these concepts are used across functions. As an example, here’s how we explained the benefits of Elements for each department, during our company kickoff earlier this year.

Being Brave

The story isn’t over for us at Gainsight. We’re not 100% prescriptive yet. We have our “point of view” now. But communicating it will take bravery.

For me, being brave means subduing in my mind all the messages I tell myself about how I’m not good enough. From the time we are little, we hear messages from all around us that disempower us. Messages such as:

  • Nice girls don’t get angry
  • Strong boys aren’t artistic
  • It’s weak to cry
  • Get in line
  • That startup job is too risky
  • You should own a home at this point
  • You should have made more money by this point
  • You should be spending more time with your kids
  • You haven’t made it far enough

We also hear messages about how exerting power—even if it’s done bravely—is inherently bad. We hear about how “power corrupts,” about celebrity take-downs. Even the blockchain movement—of which I am a passionate supporter—is often focused on removing power wherever it is.

But I’ll say that power can be applied for good or for evil. I think that if our Gainsight team can be a bit braver, we can create even more good for our clients.

I imagine your business, too, can create good for your clients.

So how will you be brave this year?

How Do I Learn More?

If you’d like to learn more about Elements, consider these steps:

  • Get a maturity assessment. We’ll show you where you are on the Maturity Curve, and which Elements you should focus on. Contact us at demo@gainsight.com.
  • Check out our website on Elements here.
  • Listen to our upcoming Season 2 of The Customer Success Podcast.
  • If you’re a client, talk to your Gainsight Client Outcomes Manager (which is our title for CSM) about enrolling in the Elements Program.

Special thanks to the many Gainsters who contributed to this initiative!

  • April 10, 2018
  • Allison Pickens
  • No Comments
  • Best Practices, _Customer Success, _Top Posts

Why I’m So Excited about Sally in Slack

Why I’m So Excited about Sally in Slack

If you’re a Chief Customer Officer like me, chances are your week looks something like mine:

  1. 1-hour commute from San Francisco to the Peninsula down the 101
  2. 30-minute meetings back-to-back from 7:30 a.m. – 5:30 p.m. every day. See if I can check email on my phone while walking between conference rooms
  3. Catch a ride to the airport and try to be productive on the way
  4. Wait at the gate while my flight is delayed, and run into problems getting strong wifi
  5. Spend the next day jetting around New York City, trying to be productive in cabs

What makes this crazy lifestyle possible? My phone.

When I can’t do work on my phone, that work simply won’t get done.

That’s why we launched Sally in Slack. I’ve been the #1 user of Sally within Gainsight since we launched it internally a couple of months ago. And I’m excited to tell you why I’m so excited about it.

Sally is the Gainsight chatbot—available via Slack mobile app!—that:

  1. Preps me for an onsite client meeting
  2. Tells me who is the CSM for an at-risk account
  3. Gives me the health score for a client that our Chief Revenue Officer mentions during a meeting
  4. Shows me the detailed notes from a previous client meeting that a client references during a call

Here’s just one example of how I used it last week.

I was on my way to an onsite client meeting. I had 20 minutes in the car to refresh my memory of the client. So I opened up Slack on my phone, and messaged @sally. I asked her for “Summary for [the client’s name].” Turns out that the client’s name in our Gainsight instance and Salesforce is slightly different from what I had inputted. So Sally gave me a few options. I clicked the first one, “[client’s name], Inc.”

redact1.png

Sally then showed me the summary of the account, reminding me that this is a low-6-figure account, with a renewal coming up in a few months.

The overall health score looked good at 80, but I wanted to understand the details. I scrolled down and Sally asks, “Are you interested in these additional details for [client name], Inc.?” and I clicked on the Health Score option.

Turned out that the Habits Scorecard Measure (which is our measure of sticky adoption) was strong, but the Sentiment Score Measure was mediocre. Sentiment reflects NPS results, so I dug into NPS. I was relieved to see that the recent NPS responses were Promoters, but as I clicked “Load Next,” I noticed some Passives. I was glad to be aware of the diversity in perspectives across the people we surveyed at the client.

I then clicked on “Recent Activities” below…

…and I reviewed the CSM Elaine’s notes in Timeline (Gainsight’s note-taking feature) from her recent call with the client.

Good thing I read that! I might have been blindsided by a sensitive topic if I hadn’t seen the Timeline entry.

Here’s your Productivity Hack of the week. Download Sally in Slack, and change your life. And if you’d like to see what Sally looks like in action, click here to schedule a live demo of the tool.

  • September 12, 2017
  • Allison Pickens
  • 4 Comments
  • _Customer Success

How to Boost Your Sales Outreach with Customer Marketing

How to Boost Your Sales Outreach with Customer Marketing

A few weeks ago, I posted a message on LinkedIn:

“To all Sales folks: I will be infinitely more likely to respond to your cold email if you offer to introduce me to a successful customer of yours in the initial email.”

The post had more than 160,000 views, 790 likes, and 55 comments. Clearly, I had struck a nerve.

I received a lot of messages that agreed with me. Here’s a handful:

  • “A high quality testimonial can produce up to double the open rate on email A/B testing including CTR and calls. :)”
  • “You can tailor the outreach to express the value others in the same industry have seen—those insights matter”
  • “I completely agree in total transparency as a sales rep and am lucky enough to have a handful of clients who will testify to the value I provide with B2B marketing lists.”
  • “I feel like this should be a rule in all of life. ‘We should be friends and here is a close friend who will verify I am an acceptable friend.’ ‘We should date and here is the number of my ex who will state why I was a good relationship choice.’”

But what was most interesting to me was the comments that disagreed or expressed skepticism. I’ll share a few of those here:

  • “At most companies sales reps have limited access to their customers.”
  • “What we do for other companies could be entirely different [from the] needs for your business.”
  • “It takes forever to get a reference.”
  • “Customers don’t always want to go public with their opinions.”
  • “If you aren’t in a position to invest in a conversation with me up front about your business challenges then quite frankly I wouldn’t waste my time with you.”

Phew! That last one was like a stab in the chest.

And I’ll add: that salesperson needs a wake-up call. Here’s why.

The Buyer Experience

The other day, I arrived at work—after a long commute with the usual slow-down where route 92 intersects the 101 in the San Francisco Bay Area—and I found these emails in my inbox:

How to Boost Your Sales Outreach with Customer Marketing

How to Boost Your Sales Outreach with Customer Marketing

How to Boost Your Sales Outreach with Customer Marketing

Skimming through these, I found myself on an emotional journey from impatience (“Please get to the point!”), to stress (“I have no time for this”), to sympathy for the salesperson (“Poor AE…”).

Let me reassure you: I love salespeople. I have great respect for what they do. I know what it’s like to pester a non-responsive client. I’ve led Sales teams. One of my first jobs was selling Cutco knives door-to-door (I literally “carried a bag” – full of knives). I have great admiration for salespeople’s perseverance.

In that spirit, I’m also concerned about these 3 salespeople, because their emails aren’t effective. I truly have no idea how these folks can help me and am skeptical that they can—despite assuming that they have the best of intentions.

So on that day, I clicked “Archive,” and ran off to a meeting. I’ve become quite intimate with these two Gmail buttons.

How to Boost Your Sales Outreach with Customer Marketing

You might say, “Allison, aren’t you worried about missing out? Maybe these reps had a great idea for you!” But I’m not worried. I don’t have FOMO.

Here’s why: I know that if there’s a product that would truly help me, I would have found out about it already through my network. Someone in the industry who I trust—whether it’s a friend, client, acquaintance in a similar role, or investor—would have told me about it.

  • We’d be chatting and they would say, “You know, we had a great quarter because we implemented this product and it made a big difference.”
  • Or if I had a problem that I needed to get solved, I’d call up a smart friend and ask, “How have you solved this problem?” and they’d tell me, “Check out this product. It really helped us.”
  • Or I’d post to LinkedIn and say, “Has anyone encountered a good product for XYZ?”

Although my network might be larger than most, and although I might be more plugged into the tech community than others, I am not alone on the attributes above.

And I’m not alone in this: I trust word of mouth more than any other source when considering whether to buy a product.

The Wake-Up Call

Here are the stark facts:

  • Peers and colleagues are the #1 source for gathering information during the discovery stage of a purchase decision (Source: Forrester)
  • Referrals have the highest conversion rate from Lead to Deal compared to any other type of lead, and about 4x the rate for sales-generated leads (Source: eMarketer)

Let’s come back to the comment on my LinkedIn post: “If you aren’t in a position to invest in a conversation with me up front about your business challenges then quite frankly I wouldn’t waste my time with you.”

I hear what you’re saying—you’re trying to qualify out prospects and focus your time on the best opportunities. But here’s the thing: I probably meet all your qualification criteria. I have pain points, I have budget, I have decision-making authority. But you’re not going to progress me along your pipeline by asking for a call. You’ll progress me along your pipeline if you help me get exposed to “word of mouth” about your product.

Wake-up call #1: Prospects want to talk to customers more than salespeople.

Wake-up call #2: Prospects have all the power these days. Prospects have the ability to demand a customer call, otherwise they won’t talk to you. Salespeople who decline to fulfill that request are giving up real opportunities.

It’s time for a shift in how we sell.

The Shift

Now that we’re all “awake,” let’s come back to the other comments on the LinkedIn post. These concerns are all about how hard it is to introduce a customer to a prospect.

  1. “At most companies sales reps have limited access to their customers.”
  2. “What we do for other companies could be entirely different [from the] needs for your business.”
  3. “It takes forever to get a reference.”
  4. “Customers don’t always want to go public with their opinions.”

All of these are fixable problems. They are tactical issues with tactical solutions:

  1. “At most companies sales reps have limited access to their customers.” → VISIBILITY
  2. “What we do for other companies could be entirely different [from the] needs for your business.” → MATCHING
  3. “It takes forever to get a reference.” → AUTOMATION
  4. “Customers don’t always want to go public with their opinions.” → PIPELINE

Here’s how we solve these problems cross-functionally at Gainsight. Our Customer Marketing team is at the root of this, orchestrating processes across our Sales and Customer Success teams to ensure we’re translating great customer outcomes into new business.

Challenge #1: VISIBILITY → Know Which Customers Are Successful

The worst thing you can do during a sales cycle is introduce an unhappy customer to a prospect. You have to know which customers are successful.

To check if a customer is successful, our Sales team looks up the Health Scorecards for a given client—either within the C360 page in Gainsight or on the Gainsight Sales View that sits within the Account or Opportunity page in Salesforce.

How to Boost Your Sales Outreach with Customer Marketing

Challenge #2: MATCHING → Match the Right Customer with the Prospect

Our Sales team leverages NameDrop to quickly know which of our customers are similar to the prospect they’re engaged. It’s easily accessible in the Gainsight Sales View, right on the Account and Opportunity pages in Salesforce. It empowers them with knowledge of our customers, even if they have no time to prepare.

NameDrop leverages the data you have on your customers and prospects to identify matches on key attributes, such as industry, geography, or size. AEs can also easily see if the customer is healthy, and if we have the right to share their logo by name.

To uplevel the impact of NameDrop, you can incorporate referenceable contacts and customer collateral (case studies, videos, webinars, etc). So in addition to being able to share the names of similar, healthy customers, you can easily share any collateral you have about them, or the names of willing advocates.

How to Boost Your Sales Outreach with Customer Marketing

Challenge #3: AUTOMATION → Get a Customer Reference, Quickly

If you don’t have a speedy process for customer reference calls, you’re putting your opportunities at risk. Buyers will lose confidence if it’s a long ordeal to get them connected with a customer.

When we rolled out a Customer Reference Process using Gainsight, we were able to reduce the time to coordinate a reference call from one week to one day. We also greatly increased the quality of references, making sure they were better suited for the prospect’s industry, use case, size, etc. The backbone of this improvement was:

  • “Reference Request” Call to Action (CTA): a CTA Layout that asks the Salesperson for the specific pieces of information we need to quickly coordinate a reference.
  • Advocacy Dashboard: Shows our customers with a variety of attributes and health scores relevant to a reference manager, so we can quickly search.
  • Reference Playbook: Clearly spells out the different steps of the Reference Request process, so there’s clarity on who owned which step of the process.

Reference Request CTA Layout:

How to Boost Your Sales Outreach with Customer Marketing

Challenge #4: PIPELINE → Mobilize Successful Customers

You’ve got successful customers. But are you converting them into advocates?

A Voice of the Customer (VoC) program is critical to this. Our Customer Marketing team sends Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys to our customers through Gainsight Surveys, runs a playbook in Gainsight Cockpit for our CSMs to follow up on customers’ responses, and tracks our Promoters to ensure we’re nurturing them and finding the right opportunities to enable them to advocate for Gainsight.

If a customer responds to the question “How likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend or colleague?” with a 9 or a 10, we’ll definitely find ways to take them up on that 🙂

How to Boost Your Sales Outreach with Customer Marketing

We also track the last time that a given customer gave a reference so that we don’t overwhelm them with requests.

So what now?

If you’d like to get some help assessing your own Customer-Led Selling efforts, we’ll give you an assessment and show you how you can improve.

We’ll even connect you with a Gainsight customer who has done it well 😉

Just shoot me an email at apickens@gainsight.com and we’ll get started.

  • August 28, 2017
  • Allison Pickens
  • 2 Comments
  • Best Practices, _Customer Success

Customer Success for IoT: The 6 Layers of an Ironclad Strategy

Customer Success for IoT: The 6 Layers of an Ironclad Strategy

In the keynote for our annual Pulse conference in May, we spoke about the Customer Success Network. One of the 6 trends in that Network was the spread of Customer Success practices to “real” industries. The Internet of Things is propelling that evolution.

Our friends at PTC are leaders in this transformation, so we’ve spent a lot of time picking their brains. Chief Customer Officer Paul Lenfest says:

The pace of IoT innovation is accelerating and it can be very challenging for manufacturers to bring their customers along at the same speed. With IoT, you can leverage data to not only educate your customers on the new value they can capture but also improve the customer experience and even increase the value they find in your product. Customer Success then becomes critical to smart connected product manufacturers—a competitive must-have—to proactively and rapidly guide clients to value.

IoT has created not only an opportunity but also an imperative to interpret and act on the enormous amounts of data that are being gathered about clients. In this post, we’ll discuss the 6 layers of Customer Success for manufacturers of connected devices.

Layer #1: Individual Device

Individual Device

Vendors used to be in the dark about the client experience. They might have seen the results of CSAT surveys after field service calls. They might have gathered qualitative insights about the client experience during a sales meeting. But overall, their visibility was limited.

As vendors collect more data on how devices are being used, they expand their ability to improve the client experience. They can start by being more “reactive” to client needs: e.g. following up when the data signals that a device is malfunctioning. Knowledge not only implies opportunity for the vendor, but also responsibility. If clients know you’re collecting data on them, they’ll expect that you’ll follow up in the right scenarios.

That means that vendors have to:

  1. Identify new scenarios where intervention makes sense
  2. Define new roles for handling those scenarios
  3. Design playbooks for what to do in each scenario
  4. Identify and track metrics for assessing the results of those playbooks

Layer #2: Across Devices

Across Devices

The next layer of Customer Success involves capturing synergies across devices.

A manufacturer providing real-time in-home radon detection may observe unusually high levels of radon in someone’s home. Having designed the “reactive” playbooks in section #1 above, that manufacturer can trigger a technician to call the homeowner and troubleshoot the problem.

However, what if the data shows an abundance of houses in the same area that have high levels of radon? Capturing this trend across clients can allow the manufacturer to deliver even more value for clients, for example, by notifying the necessary regulatory agency in the area to determine the root cause.

Moreover, as a vendor gathers more data across all devices, it can start to predict how the client experience will unfold, and then support the client accordingly. A much-cited Harvard Business Review article describes a manufacturer’s ability to intervene immediately when detecting “risk” in a client relationship: “Knowing that a customer’s heavy use of a product is likely to result in a premature failure covered under warranty, for example, can trigger preemptive service that may preclude later costly repairs.”

Detecting patterns across devices can also enable longer-term improvements. If one device malfunctions, the vendor can provide a software update that fixes the problem across all devices.

Layer #3: From Devices to Services

From Devices to Services

Vendors have an opportunity to not merely manufacture devices, but to drive tangible business results for clients through new types of services.

Current services might focus merely on product warranties. But future services can include “Insights as a Service.” Providers can augment point-of-use information gathered from connected devices with external data sets to help their clients make more informed business decisions. In addition, preventative maintenance services can leverage data to prevent problems from escalating, and thus offer higher product performance guarantees or SLAs.

As an example, before innovations in IoT, any time there were warnings of in-flight engine irregularity, airlines would require a long, costly inspection of the entire engine. But today, Rolls Royce’s IoT-enabled jet engines use in-flight data to generate real-time safety assessments, and determine specifically which areas of the engine are in need of maintenance. This generates massive time and cost savings for the airline.

A plethora of other services that drive value for clients are emerging—including remote services (“Can you fix my problem without arranging a service visit?”), services involving augmented reality overlays (“Help me figure out how to fix this myself”), comparative benchmarking (“Am I getting full value out of my devices?”), and education services (“How do I use these more complex devices?”).

Beyond offering services as a supplement to devices, vendors may even forgo charging for their products and instead charge for their consumption. Big Belly once manufactured trash cans for sale, but now it provides trash pick-up as a service—pricing its offering to more closely match the value that clients are deriving.

Layer #4: From Services to Outcomes

From Services to Outcomes

Vendors can go one step further by demonstrating to the client that they’ve driven strong outcomes. Clients don’t just want to consume services—they want to achieve a real return-on-investment on their purchase.

Vendors can use point-of-use data to quantify the ROI and also showcase that value in executive meetings with the client or even monthly or quarterly email updates. Demonstrating ROI to the client in this way helps pre-empt the question: “Why are we paying so much money for this service, and do we really need it?” It also paves the way for upsell or cross-sell, since clients are more likely to invest when they’re convinced of the value they’ve already derived.

eCompliance is a workplace safety company that offers Field iD, which tracks equipment on the job site and identifies potential risks to workers. eCompliance is able to track workplace incidents that have been averted through use of its products—meaning they can report back to clients, “Here’s the return on investment you’ve achieved by working with us.”

Once vendors recognize that they’re in the business of driving outcomes for their clients, they realize that they don’t merely have the responsibility to offer a device in a transaction—they must also shoulder the responsibility for change management. Clients of connected devices may have to change their own behaviors and operations.

Driving change and delivering outcomes at the client requires not just the advent of new services, but the development of a new function at the vendor: Customer Success Management. Traditional Services organizations are expanding their ranks to include Customer Success Managers, who take responsibility for driving outcomes for the client—often quarterbacking on the client’s behalf to mobilize resources at other departments within the vendor.

That cross-functional collaboration comprises the next layer of Customer Success.

Layer #5: Across Your Company

Across Your Company

Data can help vendors fix a problem or drive an outcome. But even more impactfully, the data collected by devices can help vendors improve their entire delivery model.

A vendor can dramatically improve its operations by marrying data from devices with data from other sources such as Support tickets, Net Promoter Score surveys, and CRM or contract data. You can now do analyses such as, “Is there an opportunity to sell more maintenance contracts among large clients with low NPS ratings but high consumption of the devices and frequent Support interactions?” The results of such an analysis yields insights for departments across the company.

This feedback loop can allow multiple departments to iterate together on the client journey, as McKinsey describes in detail here. Feedback also allows your R&D department to accelerate product improvements.

Arguably, R&D departments at device manufacturers need to have the client in mind even more than their peers at software companies. When initially designing the product, they must consider exactly what sorts of outcomes they want clients to achieve. They have to consider from the outset (1) What indicators define success? and (2) How can I gather data on those indicators by building the right sensors, microprocessors, controls, ports, and other components into the product? Those decisions on design typically can’t be revisited later. Getting input early on from other departments—such as Support, Field Services, and Sales—will make a huge difference.

Layer #6: Across Companies

Across Companies

The opportunities to drive outcomes for clients multiply when manufacturers build devices that can communicate with each other through APIs. For example, a Nest thermostat can share data with a Kevo smart lock so that the thermostat can adjust the temperature when the homeowner enters the house. If Nest and Kevo collaborated on additional use cases, together they could expand the value that the client derives from the system of their devices.

Particularly in settings such as hospitals, cities, factories, and work sites, which may purchase connected devices from multiple manufacturers, the opportunities to drive synergies between devices continue to grow.

Here’s an example: PTC’s customer Teel Plastics, a custom extruded plastic tubing and profiles company, leveraged an IoT solution to connect disparate machines on their Baraboo, Wisconsin factory floor, including Programmable Logic Controllers from both Siemens and Allen-Bradley. In doing so, Teel Plastics improved factory efficiency (reducing setup times by 30%), reduced the risk of human error in shifting from manufacturing one recipe to the next, decreased asset downtime leveraging predictive maintenance, and ultimately produced greater output at a much higher quality.

This example shows the value of creating systems across vendors. When vendors don’t merely solve for Customer Success in the silo of their own products but instead work with each other (perhaps through the involvement of a third party), they can achieve much greater overarching outcomes for mutual customers.

  • June 20, 2017
  • Allison Pickens
  • 1 Comment
  • _Customer Success

How We Built Our India Customer Success Team

Allison Pickens is Chief Customer Officer at Gainsight. Thanks to many Gainsters for building the processes described in this post and contributing to the writing of it – including Sridhar Gollapalli (Director of our Customer Success team in India), Sara Vaughan, Emily McDaniel, Will Robins and Devin Stevens.

As I write this, I’m flying from our Hyderabad, India, office back to the U.S. This week marks 6 months since we hired our first Customer Success team leader there. It’s been 6 months of tremendous learning.

Gainsight has always had an office in India, since our Co-founder and VP of Engineering is based there. Folks sometimes assume that we established an India office to “outsource” or “offshore” work, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Essentially all of our product development happens there, 2 offices are there (Hyderabad and Bangalore), and half of our employees are there, supported by a large local management team.

Many tech companies are similarly distributed internationally – increasingly from an early stage. It’s common to hear about co-founders located in multiple countries from the beginning, or a company acquiring another to gain an engineering office abroad. It’s good business to hire the most talented folks, regardless of where they live.

It’s also good business to co-locate part of your Customer Success organization with your engineers. CS benefits from easy access to information on new releases and to help on bugs or the most difficult escalations; Engineering benefits from the feedback and use cases that the CS organization can share.

But most importantly, having a global CS team creates so many new opportunities to deliver great outcomes for customers.

We’re pretty proud of the creativity of our India CS team. At an internal offsite, they hacked our Sponsor Tracking feature in a demo org and turned it into a matchmaking tool for marriages (!).

Besides figuring out how to orchestrate loving relationships (just kidding), here’s what we’ve learned in building our CS team in India.

Make-up of Our Team

As a reminder, here’s what our global CS org structure looks like and here’s how we’ve applied customer segmentation.

The India team has the following functions:

  • Onboarding
  • Technical Success: Support team and Customer Success Architect (CSA) team
  • Business Operations, including Customer Marketing
  • Services Operations (soon)

We don’t have Client Outcomes Managers — which is our title for CSMs — in India yet, but we’ll likely change that as our customer base expands globally.

Our Customer Success organization is geographically distributed across Hyderabad; St. Louis, Missouri; San Francisco and Redwood City, California; and other cities in the U.S. where some CSMs are in the field. We span 5 timezones.

This geographic distribution has required us to build smart processes to facilitate collaboration and communication between geographies. Here’s how we built those processes.

Onboarding Team

The India Onboarding team is particularly involved in the configuration of Gainsight, unit testing, and system testing. We align across geos on a common project plan and use certain templates to share the details of the client’s use cases. The goal is flawless transfer of information. We’ll review those templates on calls. We’ve divided up which specific activities are done in the U.S. and which are done in India.

For the speedy onboarding of our SMB customers in particular, we use a Call to Action (CTA) in our own instance of Gainsight that assigns certain activities to the India team members. We track progress as team members check off tasks.

gs accelerate program

Customer Success Architect Team

The Customer Success Architect (CSA) team is similarly located in both India and the U.S. CSAs offer in-depth technical advice post-onboarding, configuration help, and managed services.

Our India CSA team handles many data-related activities and also runs our Instance Review process. We created a best-practice standard for customer configuration, to demonstrate what each customer should have in their instance to get maximal value from the product. Once we identify a customer who needs their instance updated, the CSA team conducts a review of the instance and then configures what’s required to get them up to par.

To manage instance reviews, the CSAs use Calls to Action in Cockpit. In the screenshot below, you can see that the task deadline indicates when we’ll need the instance review completed. We use Chatter on the CTA to communicate and discuss progress. Using Gainsight, we have a single source of truth for work allocation and priorities across geographies.

india cs teams

Support Team

Having Support teams in both the U.S. and India is hugely beneficial to the client experience, for two central reasons:

  1. Response time: Our L1 team is split across the U.S. and India, to ensure 24-hour coverage for 5 days per week. We’re now gearing up for 7 days per week. This will mean that the teams will be available to cater to customers’ needs no matter what time zone they’re in or how late they stay up at night.
  2. Resolution time: Our L2 team is based in India, which allows L1 team members to hand off tricky tickets to L2 at the end of the U.S. work day but rest assured that progress will be made by the India team overnight. During U.S. public holidays, the India team covers for the U.S. team, and vice versa.

Throughout the week, we conduct various team meetings and send out email summaries to ensure everyone across geos is on the same page. These activities include the following:

  • Weekly global manager meeting
  • Weekly local manager meeting
  • Weekly global L1 meeting
  • Weekly L2 meeting
  • Daily local stand-up to discuss new and hot issues
  • Weekly email to summarize known issues from the previous week
  • Weekly email to summarize metrics and management escalated tickets

Each sub-team by location has a team lead or manager. This person is the local point of contact for urgent issues and events affecting the team.

Our Support team uses Zendesk as our tracking system to manage collaboration across groups and timezones.

All tickets submitted by customers land in the “Triage” queue. A more experienced team member is assigned to watch the triage queue at all times and assign tickets to the Support agent that’s most likely going to be able to resolve the issue. Once a ticket is picked up by an agent, it generally stays with that agent unless that agent goes out of office or we identify an agent with different expertise is needed to move the ticket to resolution.

If a ticket needs to be escalated to a more technical group, we use a macro that has prompts for the information required by the India-based L2 team in a private comment. These prompts are also helpful for the L2 team because they know exactly what information they are looking at when they open the ticket.

support team

When a ticket is escalated to L2, we keep the ticket assigned to the original agent to continue communicating with the customer, while the L2 team conducts further research behind the scenes. We use fields on the Zendesk ticket to track which phase the ticket is in and who from L2 has been assigned as the owner.

In Zendesk, each team member has multiple views set up to keep track of the tickets they own in various stages. In addition, we have global views for managers to keep a close watch on tickets escalated to L2, tickets that are on the verge of an SLA breach, and tickets that are aging.

Business Operations

Members of our Business Operations team in India drive the administration of our own Gainsight instance and many of our Customer Marketing initiatives.

Our Gainsight Admin in India works closely with U.S. team members (across many departments) to set up configurations and processes. She is also well positioned to work closely with our Product and Engineering teams, since she works right next to them. She’s able to share real-world use cases for Gainsight features with Product and Engineering, while having the best foresight into upcoming features and enhancements that could benefit customers.

Our Customer Marketing Analyst in Hyderabad creates customer case studies, coordinates sales references, manages our Influitive hub, and quarterbacks many other advocacy initiatives. Combined with our content creation effort in the U.S., we’re producing collateral for our Sales, Marketing, and CSM teams around the clock.

General Communication

As much as possible, we aim to empower team members to travel from the U.S. to India and vice versa. This helps teams understand the culture and communication style of different offices. One of the typical challenges we encounter during face-to-face communication is confusion over the meaning of head nods. This tends to elicit a lot of laughs in both geos 🙂 For U.S. folks: if you don’t know what we mean, our India Customer Success team leader Sridhar recommends that you check out this video.

We also have a biweekly meeting between Sridhar and the other Customer Success department leaders. The agenda typically includes:

  1. Report and share status of work. Call out any risks that impact the milestones
  2. Discuss upcoming work
  3. Discuss strategic initiatives to drive faster implementations
  4. Discuss process improvements to collaborate better

If you’d like to use Gainsight to ensure better collaboration across your geographically dispersed teams, contact your Gainsight CSM.

  • April 19, 2017
  • Allison Pickens
  • No Comments
  • Best Practices, _Customer Success

The Chief Revenue Officer’s Guide to Customer Success: Revenue Growth in the Helix

revenue-growth in helix

If you’re a Chief Revenue Officer, you wake up every morning thinking about how to grow faster.

That will never change. But as your company shifts to a recurring revenue business model, the way that you grow must change.

10 years ago, you were thinking about the Pipeline of hand-offs. How to manage hand-offs from Marketing to Sales Development, hand-offs from Sales Development to Sales Reps, and transitions from Stage A to Stage B — as quickly as possible, at the highest price, as predictably as possible.

Today, the best CRO’s know that strong revenue growth doesn’t come from a straight-and-narrow Pipe. It comes from the Helix.

Helix

Let’s step back. Where does revenue come from, in a recurring revenue business model?

helix

Leads are the start AND end of the Pipe. When you demonstrate to a customer that they’ve achieved a financial return on their purchase, you’ve created at least 3 new leads:

  • A lead for a Renewal event: This customer is prime to be renewed.
  • A lead for an Expansion deal: This customer will be amenable to get even more value from their partnership with you. In fact, there may be multiple expansion opportunities.
  • A lead for a New Logo: This customer will be happy to speak to a prospective customer about the value they’ve achieved. In fact, they’ll be willing to speak to multiple prospects.

If you make your customers successful, you can turn 1 new lead into 3+ leads. And in turn, those 3 incremental leads result in 3 x 3 = 9+ new leads. And those 9+ leads result in 9 x 3 = 27+ new leads. That’s exponential growth.

You’re not just looping around. You’re looping around AND moving on up. In fact, the Helix truly looks like this. With exponential growth in leads, the jump from loop to loop actually widens as you ascend.

helix

The growth pattern of successful recurring revenue companies resembles an expanding Helix: the successful customer brings you back to your starting point (leads), but your company is increasingly better off than it was before.

Driving revenue growth as a Helix requires a new way of working.

Your Company in the Helix

10 years ago at your company, every department was siloed from the others. Hand-offs between them were often the only interactions. And every hand-off was highly scrutinized. This is the world of Sales arguing with Marketing over the quality of the leads, Marketing arguing with Product about whether there was enough “demo ware,” etc.

helix

 

Today, your company’s organizational model is flipped 90 degrees. If it’s not now, it will be in 5 years.

helix

Every department needs to work across the customer lifecycle. Here’s what this means for the departments that are aligned to revenue:

Sales: Driving deals at every point on the customer’s journey. They’re closing new logos, renewals, and expansions.

Marketing: Driving pipeline at every point on the customer’s journey. They’re finding new leads, finding expansion leads, and finding customers who will generate new leads.

Customer Success: Driving value at every point in the customer’s journey. They’re holding value workshops and planning discussions during pre-sales, they’re defining value workstreams at the kickoff call, and they’re demonstrating value attainment during Executive Business Reviews.

These 3 departments work together across the customer journey, in unison. They’re like a symphony: each department playing a different instrument but in harmony with the others.

Your Pipeline in the Helix

Each department has a new charter. That means each department’s success needs to be measured differently from before.

Each department needs a target that captures how they’re driving each of 3 revenue events: new logo, renewal, expansion.

New Logo Renewal Expansion
Sales New Logo ARR Renewed ARR Expansion ARR
Marketing Marketing Qualified New-logo Leads (MQNLs) Marketing Qualified Renewal Leads (MQRLs) Marketing Qualified Expansion Leads (MQELs)
Customer Success Customer Success Qualified Advocacy (CSQAs) Customer Success Qualified Healthy Customers (Habits Scorecard) Customer Success Qualified expansion Leads (CSQLs)

As you can see from this chart, pipeline is coming from your existing customers. It’s all around you. You’re swimming in pipeline.

Your Go-to-Market in the Helix

Your recurring revenue business model is telling you that there’s a better Go-to-Market approach than what you’ve done in the past.

Your customers propel your Go-to-Market. Here’s how. There are 9 plays that CROs can use to drive revenue in the Helix:

helix

(1) Lead: Enable and Incent Post-Sales Team to Create Leads

Everyone who interacts with the customer should be a source of leads.

Create a set of triggers for support, professional services, training, and CSMs (if you have them) to help them know when it’s time to send a lead to sales.  Make the process streamlined so it results in a new “lead” in Salesforce for the AE – as if it came from Marketing.

And incent each team member with a simple and transactional reward system.

helix

(2) Opportunity: Put Healthy References In Front of Sellers In Real-time

Many companies build marketing reference teams and a complex process for reps to get references from Marketing.  While this can be important for key references, the most valuable references are the ones that are “name dropped” in real-time on a first call between a rep and a prospect.  However, the death knell for any deal is “name dropping” a reference that’s actually unhappy.  So lots of reps don’t even try.

One of the biggest values of Customer Success is to provide actionable information for sales. Sales reps should have, right in their Opportunity view in Salesforce, a list of happy, referenceable clients related to the prospect, in real-time.

helix

(3) Close: Capture Desired Client Outcomes at Deal Closure

Reps have the most critical information in their heads right as they move the Opportunity to Closed Won in Salesforce – why the client is buying.  Make sure that is captured in a Success Plan at deal closure.  Not only will this help the Onboarding and CSM teams, but also it will help the rep nail the future Executive Business Reviews to realign with the exec sponsor and drive renewal and up-sell.  Come up with a structured and streamlined Success Plan template – integrated into Salesforce.com – to make the hand-off seamless.

helix

(4) Onboarding: Survey Customer 30 Days After Sale and Incent Rep On Answer

At the end of the day, Helix revenue is driven by closing high quality deals.  Sales teams want to bring on customers that will stay and grow – with the right expectations upfront.  Survey new clients automatically 30 days after Closed Won and ask the client a simple question: “On a scale of 1-5, how well did [sales rep] set your expectations in the sales cycle?”  Don’t hold the sales rep accountable for the whole experience – hold the rep accountable for the expectations.

Make this a carrot incentive and pay out a bonus for every 5/5 survey.

helix

(5) EBR: Crush Your EBR With A Success Plan, White Space, and Killer Deck

The funny thing about “Executive” Business Reviews is they often don’t attract or impress “executives” at clients.  They are frequently poorly-organized and very tactical.  Change this by having:

  • A standard playbook for accountability in an EBR – between the rep, CSM and others
  • A Success Plan (captured from the sales cycle) that you can use to frame the meeting around the client’s desired outcomes
  • A “white space analysis” beforehand showing what the client owns and is using – and what more they could benefit from
  • An automated process to produce the deck in a consistent, data-driven and high quality fashion

helix

(6) Expansion: Jump On Good Moments When They Happen To Drive Up-sell

Customer relationships aren’t always great.  They have their ups and downs.

Great companies jump on the “up” moments to expand relationships.  When a client gives you a 10/10 on a NetPromoter Survey, has a successful launch, has a great support experience or shows high product activity, you need to be on it.

Operationalize a mechanism such that sales can get engaged right away during every positive moment in the customer journey.  And track which ones end up yielding closed expansions.

Rinse and repeat.

Also, make sure you’re not blindsided by existing customer risk during this process.  Make sure every rep has a full view of client risk (adoption, surveys, support, services, etc.)  The worst thing you can do is call a client for an up-sell during a sev 1 escalation.

helix

(7) Renewal: Get Ahead of Sponsor Risk

The number one killer of renewals is sponsor change.  When you lose your sponsor at an account:

  • Find out immediately (via social media, for example)
  • Create a standard playbook with accountability between the rep and CSM
  • Craft a standard email template to reach out to the new sponsor
  • Send a gift basket for extra measure!
  • Define a streamlined “re-introduction” deck for the new sponsor and automate it, if possible, to include a company overview, the history of the relationship and usage / value / outcomes driven thus far
  • Don’t forget your former sponsor; follow them to wherever they go next (gift basket!) and generate a new lead in the process

helix

(8) Automate: Get More High Quality Time By Automating Low Value Tasks

Work diligently through the lifecycle to automate:

  • Reference lookup (e.g., via name drop references on the Opportunity)
  • Desired outcome capture (e.g., via surveys)
  • Routine email outreaches (e.g., via email templates)
  • Executive Business Review preparation (e.g., via automation of deck creation)
  • Call preparation (e.g., via a client health scorecard)
  • Renewal notifications (e.g., via automated emails)

(9) Bonus: Scale Customer Success By Making It Virtual

Customer Success isn’t all about CSMs.  You can use standardization and automation to push the “Customer Success” process to:

  • Sales reps
  • Account managers
  • Renewal reps
  • Services managers
  • Support managers
  • Marketing (for smaller clients)
  • And even partners

If you’d like to learn more about how to drive these 9 plays to achieve Revenue Growth in the Helix using Gainsight, feel free to get in touch with Allison at apickens@gainsight.com.

helix

  • April 18, 2017
  • Allison Pickens
  • 1 Comment
  • Best Practices, _Customer Success

Evangelism Isn’t the Solution

Evangelism Is not the Solution

For the past 3 years, I’ve met many Customer Success evangelists.

You know who you are. You go to all the Customer Success meet-ups. You’re well-versed in best practices for EBRs. You can talk all day about automated emails for your long tail of small business customers.

I know what you’re thinking about, because I’m right there with you. We’ve probably traded war stories at one of those meet-ups.

We’ve probably waxed poetic together about creating a “customer-centric culture.”

And some of us have succeeded in creating one. Some of us have shown our Sales team that they should give up some of their budget to invest in CSMs. Some of us have convinced our Product teams to save room in the roadmap for enhancements based on customer feedback. Some of us have persuaded our Support teams to consider the customer’s context when prioritizing tickets.

But many of us haven’t.

I was talking to a fellow Customer Success exec at our Chief Customer Officer Summit a few weeks ago. This person was talking about the speed of executive turnover in our industry. They were saying that the #1 reason why Customer Success execs leave their jobs is because they can’t convince their fellow exec team members to get on board the CS train. They come up against a brick wall.

Here’s the harsh reality. If your CEO is not on board with Customer Success principles, you won’t succeed. You can’t do this alone.

And if your CEO/exec team is not on board, and you can’t do it alone, then your company is not going to succeed. Period.

Lots of folks are starting to realize this. They’ve come to us asking if we can facilitate a discussion with their broader executive team, to help the other execs come to the realization that times are changing.

In the past 5 business days alone, we’ve done these Success Briefing Centers with 4 of our clients. What’s so remarkable about these cross-functional discussions is that the other functional leaders are asking to serve as references for the SBC.

I’ve actually never felt so positive about the future of Customer Success. When you witness those “Aha” moments, it’s hard not to get giddy:

  • The head of Customer Marketing realizes that there’s a way to pair up an advocate with a prospect in 24 hours, not 7 days.
  • The head of Field Sales realizes that she can get customer usage trends into the hands of a strategic account executive who’s on the road all day.
  • The head of Professional Services realizes that he can prove he’s driving fast time-to-value and not just breaking even on a P&L.
  • The head of Inside Sales realizes that there’s a way to help account managers avoid the embarrassment of pushing an upgrade on a customer that’s in the middle of a support escalation.
  • The head of IT realizes that there’s a better way to work with the business leaders to build the customer hierarchy he’s been trying to create for 3 years.

(Psst…Did you hear that? That’s the sound of renewed optimism.)

Our CEO Nick and I have time to do 10 more of these before our Pulse conference in May. If you’re interested, feel free to send us a note.

Allison: apickens@gainsight.com
Nick: nmehta@gainsight.com

  • March 30, 2017
  • Allison Pickens
  • No Comments
  • _Customer Success

Perfect Data Is a Myth. Waiting to Get Technology Is a Mistake

Perfect Data Is a Myth

As Chief Customer Officer, I consider it a fundamental part of my job to work with Sales to ensure that we don’t sell to customers that aren’t ready for our product.

We’ve obsessed over our pre-sales readiness process and even dedicated a Customer Health Scorecard Measure to track its effectiveness. Our VP of Sales is formally accountable to our CEO for making sure that Scorecard Measure is Green for every customer. We even survey all customers a few weeks into their onboarding to ask whether their Account Executive set expectations appropriately.

Bottom line: Anyone on the Gainsight Sales team can tell you that selling to a customer that won’t get value from our solution, or setting the wrong expectations with a prospective customer, is a complete “no-no.”

That’s why it’s funny to me that we regularly hear from companies that they are concerned that they’re not ready to implement a Customer Success Management tool because their data “isn’t perfect,” or their organization “isn’t sophisticated enough.” Some of them plan to spend six months to a year perfecting workflows and cleaning data and then begin looking at putting software into place. Truly, I believe this is a mistake. You’re foregoing revenue growth for every week that you wait.

There’s a second set of feedback, a recurring sentiment that we hear just as frequently: “We wish we hadn’t waited to implement Gainsight. We should have pulled the trigger six-to-eight months ago.”

That’s the essence of this conflict: pre-Gainsight CSM orgs tend to want to wait. Post-Gainsight orgs tend to wish they hadn’t. Don’t take my word for it: hear it from our customers:

“We grew—our first year—2,000%. In our second year in 2015, we grew another 2,000%. We were growing very quickly, but we did need the playbooks and the health scores and all that to be proactive versus completely reactive. […] And so it was something where we should have [implemented Gainsight] earlier with our growth, and it’s definitely been a game-changer for us.”
Katie Rogers, Vice President of Customer Success, SalesLoft

“We thought we knew our data better than we actually did, and Gainsight helped us with that part of it. Gainsight was critical in helping us map that out and helping us know exactly how we had to clean that data to make it consumable by the tool.”
Jeff Kirkpatrick, Senior Customer Success Operations Architect, Red Hat

“Perfection is the enemy of progress and waiting to implement Customer Success until it’s perfect is a guaranteed approach to losing revenue. Much like an agile software development process, an effective Customer Success effort requires fast iterations, failures, learnings, and improvements.”
Ed Daly, Senior Director of Global Customer Success, Cisco

I could insert many more quotes here, but I’m sure you get the picture 🙂

It’s not just anecdotal evidence that illustrates the importance of using software to achieve your customer success goals. Our quantitative data support the conclusion that there’s an exponential increase in Gross Retention, Rate of Expansion, and Net Retention as organizations achieve Proactive and Predictive capabilities. Our Director of Customer Success Strategy, Scott Golden, gave a presentation on this at our recent CCO Summit. Keep an eye out for his blog post recapping his results and methodology in the next week, but in the meantime, check out this chart based on his findings:

Perfect Data Is Myth

As you can see, there’s a clear correlation between your operational maturity and your gross and net retention – you retain and expand customers more effectively as you progress from stage to stage.

You can’t do this without technology. Technology is what allows you to make the improvements necessary to move from Reactive, to Informed, to Proactive, to Predictive. Take it from someone who has seen countless companies struggle without software.

Technology is what allows you to operationalize all the best practices that the Customer Success community has been discussing vigorously for years. All the processes that I blog about — driving a consistent customer journey, managing at-risk accounts, demonstrating value to your clients, accelerating advocacy, enabling coordination between your CSM team and Sales team on upsell, working together across functions — I’ve never seen a company do this effectively without technology.

You cannot afford to put off those results while you perfect your data. If you’re at the mean of this dataset, you’re forgoing an 18-percentage-point increase in Net Retention from the Reactive stage to the Predictive stage.

At a recent “Office Hours” panel with leaders from Red Hat, Box, and Cornerstone OnDemand, each company admitted that they were hesitant about their data quality before they implemented Gainsight. Here’s what they said about how the Gainsight implementation process actually improved their data quality and organizational efficiency:

Gainsight Office Hours

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The truth is, you’ll never have perfect data, or perfect workflow, or perfect segmentation. There is no “end game” organization. But the good news is you don’t need to have a perfect org to gain significant returns on your investment in a technology solution for Customer Success. In fact, technology gets you closer to perfection:

  1. The data cleanliness you seek can be accelerated through the implementation process, as you integrate your data sources into a powerful Rules Engine.
  2. The strategic sophistication you seek can be standardized across your team as you put best practices into action, using features like Vault (our best practices library in the product) and guidance from my team
  3. The lull in workload that you’re waiting for will finally arrive as you take advantage of automation tools and move beyond fire-fighting with proactive processes.

It’s like waiting to buy the car until you get to your destination. You need the car in order to get there.

At Gainsight, we’re very, very good at working with your embarrassingly dirty data and your super messy organization. We’ve worked with all levels of data cleanliness and operational maturity, and we can work with yours. Customer Success is a transformative discipline, and Gainsight is a transformative tool. Let us be your partner in your transformation. My team won’t let you down :).

  • March 28, 2017
  • Allison Pickens
  • 1 Comment
  • Evaluating CS Technology, _Customer Success

Aligning with Partners On Customer Success

aligning with partners on customer success

This blog post was co-authored by Allison Pickens and Chris Doell. Allison Pickens is Chief Customer Officer at Gainsight. Chris Doell leads Customer Success for Cisco’s Cloud Security Division. Many thanks to Kelli Kirwin, now Director, Offer Monetization Office at Cisco, for her pioneering work in the area of Customer Success in the channel and for contributing to this post.

Customer Success at scale is much more than one-to-many email automation to engage the long tail of your customer base. Collaborating with your partner ecosystem on Customer Success can be another key to scaling.

When it comes to your partner ecosystem, it’s about alignment: specifically, alignment on the customer’s intended outcomes, on the touch points along the customer journey, and on incentives for the customer, vendor, and partner.

When alignment happens, every constituency wins. Customers derive quicker time-to-value that is consistent with standardized journey maps, vendors benefit with better margins due to reduced adoption costs, and partners not only increase their margins and retention rates, but also identify upsell/cross-sell opportunities and enhance their competitive position.

There’s an opportunity for a major paradigm shift in vendor-partner relationships — leading to an ecosystem that is aligned around the customer’s success. We’re observing the unfolding of a world where vendors and partners have:

  • A shared responsibility for positive customer outcomes,
  • A shared toolset and 360-degree view of the customer along their journey,
  • Shared, trusted barometers for Customer Health (including NPS, adoption, advocacy, and other metrics), and
  • Better alignment on prescribed customer journeys and the playbooks that make them happen.

Let’s reflect on that for a moment. The entire fabric of the vendor-partner relationship is going to change, as a result of the Customer Success movement.

Traditionally, most partners focus on transactional activity and measure it via margin preservation, top-line bookings, and services attach rates — often in that order. In the new paradigm, however, vendors will include their channel partners, alongside internal functional stakeholders (Support, Sales, Marketing, Product, CSMs, etc.), as another primary contributor in the journey toward customer success.

Further, vendors will be expecting their Channel to contribute to customer outcomes.

This is our vision of the future, but it’s a radical shift, and it won’t happen overnight. Many partners simply cannot invest in proactive, nurture-oriented team members without seeing proof of reward. So frankly, it’s the vendor’s responsibility to prove the value of the new paradigm and then extend it across a broader set of partners.

Start out with a couple of progressive partners, and once proven (as many of you have done internally!), you can “rinse and repeat” the model across a broader set of partners. Here’s our recommended playbook for working with partners to drive Customer Success:

  1. Profile Your Partners
  2. Define the ROI to the Partner
  3. Share Customer Insights
  4. Provide Enablement
  5. Define the Division of Labor
  6. Measure Partner Effectiveness

#1: Profile Your Partners

As vendors encourage their partners to roll out CS programs, they need to prioritize their time effectively across their partner ecosystem. Start with a small group – think 2-4. Hand-select them for success.

Vendors are prioritizing partners based on several factors:

  1. Are services a core part of their business model?
  2. Does the partner have a “lifecycle” or “adoption” practice?
  3. Do we expect that the partner would derive a strong ROI from investing in CS, due to e.g. enhanced cross-sell and upsell?
  4. Are there several people whose roles are focused on customer success or training?
  5. For larger partners:
    • Is there an executive at the partner who is committed to Customer Success?
    • Is there specifically a Customer Success executive, or just CSMs reporting to a Sales/Support/Operations executive?

Once you’ve got your small group, start a pilot. See what works well and what doesn’t. Then expand your list.

#2: Define the ROI to the Partner

Work with your prioritized partners to help them demonstrate that expanding their CS program is worth it. Most partners won’t do this on their own – it’s incumbent on you, as the vendor, to show the ROI.

There are four sources of ROI to a partner:

  1. Growth in Product Revenue, e.g. faster expansion into existing accounts, or reduced client attrition. Among recurring revenue businesses, ascending the Customer Success maturity curve can improve Gross Retention rates by 10-20 percentage points, and improve Net Retention rates by 20-30 percentage points. (We plan to write more about the Customer Success maturity curve in a future post.)
  2. Growth in Services Revenue.Many partners have razor-thin margins on re-selling the product. But their services business may generate a 30-40% margin. By offering Customer Success to its clients, a partner can become more deeply embedded with a client and better identify areas where services can add value for the client.
  3. New Revenue from Customer Success as a Service. Some vendors are launching paid CSM programs; some partners may do the same.
  4. Point of Differentiation in Attracting New Customers: A partner can stand out against others by offering a Customer Success program. Vendors can reinforce this differentiation by requiring partners to have a CS program in order to earn “Gold Status” or other designations.

Besides defining the ROI model, get a handful of partners to actually demonstrate ROI from rolling out a CS program. Get a small set of “early adopters” among partners to showcase the value to everyone else.

#3: Share Customer Insights

If you’re like most vendors, you’re “going digital” – you’re building 360-degree views of your clients, across usage data, NPS data, Support ticket data, Community portal data, and other types. That’s exactly what partners need in order to know which clients to follow up with, at what time, and for what reason.

It’s time to expose that data to your partners. Vendors are starting with the basics — e.g. emailing their partners lists of customers that have renewals upcoming in the next 30, 60, and 90 days — and then finding more systematic ways to expose other data types through Gainsight.

Information-sharing should be a two-way street. Vendors are eager to hear partners’ insights into their customers and can create systems to share that information. Vendors also want to hear their partners’ feedback on the playbooks above, and on the product itself.

#4: Provide Enablement

Besides receiving enablement in the form of ROI models and Customer Health data, partners need three additional types of support from you (the vendor):

  1. Training on Playbooks. What playbook would the vendor recommend the partner adopt when a customer is new? When adoption declines? When a renewal is coming up? What are the KPIs that the vendor is focused on, and how should the partner aim to achieve those?
  2. Certification. Vendors are planning to require that partners get certified on lifecycle management, adoption programs, or change management in order to attain certain status levels (e.g. “Gold Status”), as noted above.
  3. Partner Success Managers. Vendors can’t afford to provide these for all partners – they’re tiering their partners and allocating resources accordingly. The Vendor Account Manager role is starting to evolve into a Partner Success Manager role, analogous to the trend of more transactional Account Management teams evolving into Customer Success teams.

Some partners in particular need to raise their game, with the vendor’s help, because their paid adoption services may not be as robust as the free Customer Success that the vendor offers – which can result in channel conflict, with customers abandoning the partner.

Be thoughtful in rolling out these enablement programs, to ensure partners perceive these as a source of empowerment – i.e. bolstering the partner’s ownership of the client relationship – rather than an intrusion.

#5: Define the Division of Labor

Partners can extend your reach among SMB customers. When a vendor forms a Customer Success program, they’ll typically start by assigning CSMs to their Enterprise clients – the top tier of the client pyramid below. They often also assign CSMs to the Mid-Market segment, but may not have the budget to assign CSMs to the SMB segment. For many businesses, however, partners play within every tier of the customer pyramid.

Aligning with Partners On Customer Success

Regardless of where vendor or partner resources are applied, it’s always important to understand who is doing what. For each segment, what do you expect your team to do? What do you expect partners to do? Be specific!

The key here is protecting your brand across the lifecycle, whether your team or a partner is taking the lead on an activity. You’ll want to make sure your partners are using messaging that’s consistent with and leaves a positive imprint on your brand.

#6: Measure Partner Effectiveness

Vendors want to hold partners accountable: they want visibility into their partners’ compliance with the recommended playbooks. They also want to see partners generate real value for customers.

In fact, many vendors are planning to pay partners based on their success in driving outcomes and growth in the installed base. Some vendors are starting simple, by paying partners based on renewals — not just new logos. Others are more advanced, paying their partners based on leading indicators of renewal and expansion, such as License Utilization, Active Users, or Client Health Score.

The proof is in the pudding. Whatever metrics you use, the effectiveness of the CS investment must be measured.

This evolved payment model makes Step 3 above (sharing customer data) even more important. Vendors and partners need a common system that’s a source of truth for the data that informs payments.

Furthermore, these KPIs should be mutually agreed upon in advance, reviewed together at regular intervals, and objectively measured to avoid the dreaded (and unproductive) “he said, she said” situation. While these steps require some effort and investment in a shared toolset, they’re critical to aligning the vendor, partner, and positive customer outcomes.

As we look into the future of the vendor-partner relationship, we should consider the possibility of a partner agreement with dynamic margin percentages based on targets for Customer Health metrics. These types of shared risk / shared reward business structures are a logical next step, once vendors and partners agree to invest together in their mutual customers’ success.

***

Vendor-partner alignment is one of the biggest trends we’re seeing in Customer Success. If you’re curious to learn more or if you want to share a success story, you can reach us at apickens@gainsight.com or cdoell@cisco.com.

  • March 15, 2017
  • Allison Pickens
  • 5 Comments
  • Cross-Functional Alignment, _Customer Success

Why your team members are your clients, too

Allison Pickens is VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at Gainsight.

Whenever I gather a few Chief Customer Officers together, our discussion quickly evolves into a group therapy session. Being CCO is a tough job. That’s because every great CCO knows that s/he has 2 sets of clients: external clients, and internal clients – i.e. his or her own team members.

If you believe in Servant Leadership, which I strongly do, you view your team members as clients. You’re in your role to serve them.

This post is about how to apply the same principles of Customer Success to support the success of your team members.

Challenges

Serving both sets of clients – while simultaneously controlling costs – can be challenging. That’s because:

  1. Your team feels your company’s challenges in a very personal way. When inevitably your product hasn’t yet caught up with customers’ needs, your CSMs, Support reps, and other Customer Success team members are on the front lines of fielding customers’ concerns. If they’re the type of folks who really want to help people (which hopefully they are!), these escalations will deeply affect them.
  2. Every quarter, you start at a 100% potential gross renewal rate. It can only go down from there. If not managed properly, this framework can result in everyone focusing on what’s going wrong, as opposed to your team’s victories. That’s not great for morale.
  3. You’re on the receiving end of new logos. You can’t control whether your sales team under- or over-performs plan, or whether their forecasts are accurate. That means you risk your team becoming overworked or being overstaffed. (Neither situation is good.)
  4. You have to achieve profitability goals, even as your product and market continue to evolve. Your CFO is holding you accountable for cost targets, but if your target customer is evolving, or your Product team launches a new release every 6 weeks (which is common among especially smaller companies), your team members have to invest time in their own training. Something has to give.
  5. Process change is necessary but tough. When your product or market is evolving, every department has to evolve with it, and that requires process change. But most people don’t like changing their habits, even when they know their situation will worsen if they don’t.

At Gainsight, we’ve built processes that have helped us meet our Customer Success goals – and many of those processes are documented in this blog. Later on, we realized that the same fundamental processes would allow us to achieve our Teammate Success goals. The analogy between Customer Success and Teammate Success best practices is wonderfully perfect.

The 5 Pillars of Customer Success (and Teammate Success)

We work with our customers on 5 areas of best practices, shown in the chart below.

The 5 Pillars of Customer Success

Fascinatingly, each of these areas has a parallel in Teammate Success.

Customer Success - Teammate Success

Think about how similar these pairs are:

  • Need to focus on customer retention, not just acquisition ⇔ Need to focus on team member retention, not just recruiting top performers
  • Hand-off from Sales to Customer Success ⇔ Hand-off from Recruiting to HR
  • Consistent journey of milestones for customers ⇔ Consistent journey of milestones for team members
  • Proactively detecting early warning signs of customer churn ⇔ Proactively detecting signs that a team member is not thriving
  • Helping a customer see how much value they’re getting from the product ⇔ Helping a team member feel proud of their accomplishments
  • Making customers so successful that they advocate on behalf of your product ⇔ Making team members so successful that they refer friends to apply for jobs at your company
  • Aligning departments around the success of your customers ⇔ Aligning departments around the success of your team members

Using our Customer Success processes as a benchmark, we brainstormed the following processes to achieve Teammate Success. We haven’t implemented all of these yet, but the framework has become our North Star. We’re even considering putting these processes into our own instance of Gainsight.

Teammate Journey

The Teammate Journey processes are straightforward. I’ll highlight the monthly NPS survey as a way to get frequent data on how the team is doing. I’ll also highlight the Success Plan: just as we must understand our customers’ goals in using our product, we must understand what our teammates are looking to get out of their experience at Gainsight, as well as share what contributions the company needs from them. Then we have to chart a path to achieve those outcomes.

Teammate journey

Managing Risk

In this section, I refer to the concept of the Alliance in Reid Hoffman’s book. Quoting the Amazon summary: “As a manager you want your employees to help transform the company for the future. And your employees want the company to help transform their careers for the long term.”

In managing risk in a company’s relationship with a team member, we must understand the risk from the perspective of each of the team member and the company.

Manage risk

Just as with customer risk, it’s imperative to drive to the root cause of the risk. For example: Is the team member not succeeding because they need to develop certain skills, or because their strengths aren’t matched to the demands of their current role? Identifying the root cause helps us identify the right solution – whether it’s more training (in the first case), or switching roles (in the second case).

Demonstrate Value

Demonstrate value

Career Growth & Advocacy

Career growth advocacy

Cross-Functional Collaboration

Cross functional collaboration

  • February 21, 2017
  • Allison Pickens
  • No Comments
  • Best Practices, _Customer Success

A Guide to Customer Success Across Europe

A Guide to Customer Success Across Europe

Introduction by Allison Pickens, VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at Gainsight

In November, we held our second annual Pulse Europe conference. A few of us at Gainsight led workshops on Customer Success, but I think I learned as much (if not more) from the attendees about how to manage Customer Success in Europe, as they learned from me. These conversations were particularly timely, since my Customer Success team is starting to recruit our first team members in London.

An important theme emerged across these conversations: The “right way” to do Customer Success varies significantly across countries in Europe. There are certainly commonalities – in particular, Customer Success tends to be higher-touch in Europe than in the U.S. – but it’s mission-critical for a CSM team to vary its approach by country.

Coming out of the conference, a group of leaders decided to get together to document their observations of the unique requirements of doing Customer Success in each European country. What emerged is the following blog post, which aims to educate U.S.-based companies on how to expand their CS programs in Europe, and also to help round out the knowledge of European companies.

I can’t claim credit for this post, but rather I’m indebted to several other, more knowledgeable folks for writing it – in alphabetical order by last name, they are:

  • David Apple, Director of Customer Success at Typeform
  • Vinnie Cholewa, VP Customer Operations at CareerBuilder
  • Jan Schlosser, former Director of Customer Success, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Russia (EMEAR) at Cisco

What follows is a thorough, candid insider’s guide to doing Customer Success in each country. While the guide includes some generalizations that may be helpful rules-of-thumb, they are based primarily on the writers’ firsthand experiences. The writers welcome you to add your learnings from your own experiences in the comments, so that we can continue to supplement this group’s perspectives.

United Kingdom

CSM style: Documentation and process are as sure as the sun rising and setting in the U.K. Customer Success workflow comes naturally because of the processes that CSMs tend to follow.

Where to locate: The U.K. has the most vibrant start-up scene in Europe for emerging XaaS companies (mainly in London, but also in Birmingham, Manchester, and Edinburgh). In addition, several large global enterprises that are introducing their own Customer Success teams in Europe now have their European headquarters in or around London.

How to hire: The market has a lot of early-in-career talent who have experience in their first roles as junior Customer Success Managers. There’s plenty of compensation information readily available on sites like Glassdoor.com to help inform decisions on salaries. Labor laws in the U.K., more than many other European countries, are similar to those in the U.S.

Market factors: There are concerns about the impact of “Brexit” on the current business momentum; U.K.-based companies may be more limited to the U.K. market, as expanding into non-U.K. European markets will become more expensive at some point. Forecasts for U.K.-based companies are very conservative right now.

If you’re expanding here: The U.K. is the first economy in Europe where we see Customer Success building a beachhead coming over as a “movement” from the U.S. It is an easy market for a U.S.-based company to enter, as it is English-speaking. For U.S. companies moving to Europe, cost may be a factor. While London is a natural option given its world presence, cities like Edinburgh have plenty of individuals with the skills in multiple languages that are vital to operating in Europe at a much more cost-effective rate.

Interested in networking with your customer success peers? Check out PulseLocal EMEA, a collection of local customer success networking groups across Europe who meet regularly to network, learn and share best practices.

Germany

CSM style: Expect customers to want a high-touch approach. Attention to detail is critical to success in Germany.

There is a more conservative approach to Customer Success and high sensitivity to privacy for usage data, when used for measuring and automating customer success. Data must be stored locally and handled securely, especially for public-sector customers.

To serve German customers with Customer Success resources, you need to have native German speakers (available in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria) and German collateral. Ideally, your subscriptions should be available in German to be broadly successful here.

Where to locate: There are two or three main hubs for Customer Success: Berlin (XaaS start-up scene), Munich (the “IT-hub” for global classical tech companies), and Frankfurt (financial center with booming adjacent industries).

How to hire: You should be thoughtful about hiring permanent employees in Germany, because there is a lot of union-related inflexibility in moving employees when needed in a fast-changing business environment: long notice periods, costs of benefits, and hurdles in letting people go if the company grows to a certain critical size. Consider local regulations and comparably high tax rates.

Market factors: Germany is one of the healthiest economies in Europe with a lot of appetite to “digitize” the economy (i.e. “Industry 4.0”). Hence, it probably has the biggest business potential for Customer Success once the subscription economy gains ground here. However, we’re still skeptical as Germany usually moves slowly and is not seen as a digital leader despite their industrial leadership and potential.

If you’re expanding here: For outsiders, you don’t just jump into Germany. You need to have a very specific market fit and fully understand the nuances around data protection, legality and employment law.

Possible strategies to be successful in Germany in the subscription economy include building a strong foothold in smaller and more flexible economies first (most often, Switzerland) and expand into Germany from there when opportunities arise.

Ireland

CSM style: Most companies look at Ireland as a potential candidate for housing a Virtual Customer Success Center, with locally employed agents who do not travel to see customers (hence the term “Virtual”). Local Irish companies are not yet very visible with Customer Success offers in the European market.

Where to locate: Many of the biggest names in tech have a large presence in Dublin, including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Airbnb. This has attracted a lot of talent, but there is also a lot of competition for that talent. Intercom is the best known start-up founded in Ireland.

Market factors: Companies setting up in Ireland still enjoy some tangible tax benefits compared to other EU countries. Wages here are slightly lower compared to many Western and Central European countries (though not to Eastern and South European countries).

If you’re expanding here: Many companies look to Ireland to host their European data storage and servers. Don’t overlook the simplicity in the why, as the cool climate helps keep the giant processors happy.

Switzerland

Where to locate: Switzerland is a highly innovative and attractive location. It is a magnet for talent: e.g. Google’s European development center is based in Zürich.

How to hire: There is a very diverse and highly skilled talent pool available to drive Customer Success. You can leverage the country’s English skills in addition to its three main languages: German, French, and Italian. It has a fast-evolving talent pool for Customer Success emerging from local XaaS companies and global firms with a presence here.

Market factors: Significant tax benefits for enterprises and one of the most liberal sets of labor laws in Europe make it attractive for almost any industry to consider Switzerland as a major location and/or European headquarters. At the same time, it can be expensive to hire, particularly if you end up having to relocate folks to work there.

If you’re expanding here: Some call it “mini-Europe”, because if something is successful in the Swiss market, it is almost guaranteed success in all other European markets, especially Germany (with its sensitivity to data privacy and highly skilled workforce). Switzerland has the potential to emerge as a beachhead for Customer Success in Germany, due to language, geographical and cultural proximity and reputation in security.

Due to its geographic location in the center of Europe (easy to get from here to anywhere fast), multilingual talent pool, “Swiss” brand recognition, and a stable political environment for business (in spite of the highest labor costs in Europe), Swiss-based companies are among the most dynamic in Europe. They successfully serve European and global markets, in addition to the stable but comparably small local market.

Looking to meet and network with customer success influencers in your area? PulseLocal EMEA is a group of local customer success networking groups across Europe who meet regularly to network, learn and share best practices.

France

CSM style: France has a highly regulated market that you cannot serve from outside France: it requires a local presence and the use of the local language for all customer interactions, shared materials, and organized communities. Servicing smaller customers to drive Customer Success can be done from outside France (as it has been done in Poland, Edinburgh, and other places), but requires French-speaking CSMs – often French nationals.

Relationships absolutely matter in France. The best sales models will utilize a hybrid approach between prospectors and closers in pre-sales, and CSMs (driving usage and value) and Account Managers (fostering the long-term relationship) in post-sales.

France lags in regards to leveraging non-French subscriptions in the market and hence is rarely a priority to drive significant incremental business from better ARR and Renewal Rate improvements.

How to hire: Labor laws in France are very much in favor of the employee, which makes it very difficult and costly to fire people. Furthermore, the expectations for work hours (35 hours / week) and for vacation days are quite high. You don’t get the “joie de vivre” for free. 🙂

French people are generally well educated, and the younger generations are eager to do something different from the stereotype of the hierarchical, very formal, slow-moving, old-school French companies.

Market factors: France is one of the stronger economies in Europe, and is on par in terms of the startup scene with the UK and Germany.

If you’re expanding here: Be aware that selling subscriptions in the French market may appear easy, but if Customer Success investments are not made here, the business will not be successful. If you’re thinking of Paris, you will of course find expats from every country around the world. For this reason, Paris has been chosen by many U.S. companies as their European headquarters.

Spain

CSM style: Spain, like most European countries, requires local language support to serve local customers.

Where to locate: Cities like Barcelona attract talent from all over Europe. Asking someone to move to Barcelona from anywhere else in Europe is an easy sell, due to the weather and the quality of life. Companies like Google, HP, Cisco, Apple, and Facebook outsource part of their support and/or business development to Barcelona (via a local company called Sellbytell). Tesla is rumored to be planning to open a large office in Barcelona.

How to hire: Salaries in Spain are low compared to most of Europe, due to high unemployment rates. It is difficult to find native English speakers with prior experience in XaaS.

If you’re expanding here: Many Spanish start-ups now work in English in their offices.

Poland

How to hire: There are a few hot spots for talent here that are already leveraged by global enterprises: Krakow (with its multiple universities, great early-in-career talent pool, and multilingual capabilities in Polish, Russian, German, Italian, Spanish, and Arabic) and Warsaw, as the capital.

Market factors: With low labor costs, fairly liberal labor laws, and a highly motivated workforce, it is a great place to source talent for Customer Success functions: locally as Virtual Customer Success Managers, or as talent for other markets in Europe. It is one of the most interesting emerging countries in Europe when it comes to supporting innovation.

Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland)

CSM style: The Nordics are a natural fit for Customer Success, given the lack of hierarchies in most organizations and focus on cross-functional collaboration. They’ll tell you they’ve been focused on Customer Success for decades and the rest of the world is just trying to catch up. While English is common in the Nordics, and business is often conducted in English, don’t assume your products will be adopted if they’re English-only. Local language and support is still important to long-term success.

How to hire: Due to very good English language skills, the Nordic countries could be served by team members who are located outside of the Nordics.

Market factors: The Nordics have a vibrant market with great potential for effective Customer Success teams. There are some large customers based here and innovation is traditionally driven here, too. This market has not been sufficiently embraced by emerging XaaS companies, but it is ready to be.

Don’t forget to find and join your nearest PulseLocal peer networking group in Europe! Check out PulseLocal EMEA to see if there’s a chapter in a city near you.

Other European countries

We three writers don’t have complete knowledge of how Customer Success is done in every single country in Europe, so we’ve excluded a few, e.g. the Benelux countries, Portugal, Austria, Italy, Greece, and others. If you can fill that knowledge gap, we encourage you to contribute to this insider’s guide by posting comments below.

  • January 31, 2017
  • Allison Pickens
  • 7 Comments
  • _Customer Success

How We Segmented Our Company – Not Just Customers

Nick Mehta is CEO at Gainsight. Allison Pickens is VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at Gainsight.

Rolling out company-wide segmentation was probably the most productive initiative that our executive team pursued in 2016.

In this post, we’ve documented how we did it. What follows is a ground-up approach to segmenting your customers.

From the start, our CEO believed it was critical to have the same definition of customer segments in every department – not just in Customer Success, but also in Sales, Marketing, and other functions. Consider huddling with your exec team while you read this!

Step #1: Start from First Principles

Anyone who has read this blog knows that we’re big believers in thinking from first principles. So when we decided to segment our customers, we didn’t base it on commonly adopted (but often arbitrary) thresholds for ARR, the customer’s revenue, or the customer’s employee size.

Instead, we started with raw data. The question was: At the root, what makes different customers different?

A bunch of us pooled our observations of our customers. We jotted down notes on what different customers needed from Gainsight across the lifecycle. Then we clustered those customers together into personas. At a high level, these were our personas:

Persona A: Need guidance on how to build a CSM function from the ground up, with limited budget to do so.

Persona B: Need help managing a CSM team using data, in the midst of many other distractions.

Persona C: Need to prove the value of CSM to the Sales team.

Persona D: Need help transforming one function (often Support or Account Management) into a CSM function, or otherwise re-organizing to create room for a CSM team.

What made some companies fall into one of these categories rather than another? Our goal was to identify an attribute that was intrinsic to the customer.

We wrote down common attributes of each of these personas – industry, growth rate, touch model (high/medium/low), sales strategy, type of leader, budget, data available on customers, and other information.

As our executive team reflected on the data, we realized that the core driver of differentiation was the number of reporting levels within the company.

  • Persona A 3 levels: a couple of CSMs, reporting to a customer-facing leader (who may also manage a sales team), reporting to a CEO
  • Persona B 4 levels: CSMs, reporting to a Director of CSM, reporting to a VP, reporting to a CEO
  • Persona C 5 levels: CSMs, reporting to a Director of CSM, reporting to a VP of Customer Success, reporting to a Chief Customer Officer (who manages all of post-sales), reporting to a CEO
  • Persona D 6+ levels: multiple Chief Customer Officers, each reporting into the General Manager of a business unit

The number of levels in a customer’s organization may not be the crucial differentiator for your customer base. We’d encourage the reader to think from first principles and identify your own differentiator. But the thinking process above can come in handy.

Step #2: Pick an Ex-Ante Attribute

We had identified the root cause of differentiation. But the number of levels in a company isn’t publicly available information. We needed our Sales and Marketing teams to know immediately to which segment a prospective customer belonged.

If you take the number of levels in a company, then assuming a certain ratio of direct reports to managers, you can infer the range of employee count – which IS a publicly available number (e.g. on LinkedIn). We assumed a ratio of 7 reports per manager.

For example, 3-level organizations have a maximum of 1 + 7 + (7 x 7) = 57 employees, and a minimum of 1 + 7 + 1 = 9 employees. 4-level organizations have minimum of 58, and a max of 1 + 7 + (7 x 7) + (7 x 7 x 7) = 400 employees.

Those calculations resulted in this table:

Segment # of Levels Min Max
Persona A 3 9 57
Persona B 4 58 400
Persona C 5 401 2801
Persona D 6+ 2802 n/a

For simplicity, we rounded these ranges, and we named the segments after planets whose sizes corresponded to the employee sizes of the segments. (It wasn’t a coincidence that Nick is a huge sci-fi fan…and Allison has watched every Star Trek Next Generation episode at least twice.)

Segment # of Levels Min Max
Mercury 3 10 99
Mars 4 100 399
Venus 5 400 2999
Jupiter 6+ 3000 n/a

Step #3a: Re-Align Your CS Organization

We divided each Customer Success department into segment teams.

  • Our Client Outcomes team now has 3 sub-teams
  • Our Onboarding Project Management team has a sub-team for Jupiter and one for Venus; so does our Onboarding Solutions Architect team (more detail on that here)
  • In Mars, we combined the CO, PM, and SA roles into a hybrid role for the first year, since Mars customers tend to want one point of contact.

We took the segmentation even further. Allison now has a direct report who leads each segment and coordinates across all functional sub-teams aligned to that segment. It’s a type of Customer Success GM role, in which each leader owns their segment’s Gross Renewal Rate, Services P&L, and operational metrics — including Habits, CSQLs, Advocacy, utilization for billable folks, and others.

Now, for each segment, Allison has a single person who (1) feels a strong sense of ownership over that segment’s success, and (2) is empowered to make changes to benefit that segment.

Some CS functions, such as Technical Success (including Support), CS Operations, and Services Operations, remain horizontal across the segments. This ensures consistency and prevents us from re-creating the wheel for certain processes in each segment. But the segment leaders are empowered to request resources and assistance from those horizontal teams.

Aligning customers to a new segmentation is tough. You’ve got to be extremely thoughtful whenever changing a customer’s CSM, PM, SA, or other designated point of contact. We created a large Gantt chart to coordinate when we’d shift customers, so as to minimize disruption to their experience with us. We spent hours and hours making these decisions. We can’t say this effort completely eliminated the pain for all customers, but it helped to minimize it.

Step #3b: Re-Align Other Departments

Our VP of Sales led a similar shift in his organization. We have 1 director managing the Mars Sales team, 2 RVPs managing pods of Venus AEs, and 2 RVPs managing pods of Jupiter AEs. In addition, our Marketing team, pre-sales Solutions Consulting team, and Product Marketing team are all divided into segment teams.

There’s a hidden benefit here. Before this common segmentation, whenever there was a cross-functional issue, the VPs had to get involved. Now, the directors across functions who focus on a given segment can resolve issues together, without my involvement. This empowerment of middle-managers has made our company far more scalable.

The remaining departments – e.g. Finance, Product, Engineering – haven’t sub-divided by segment. That said, they’re intimately familiar with the characteristics and financials of each segment. Our executive team meetings are significantly more productive because everyone is aligned on the same definition of different customer types.

If you’d like to learn more about this segmentation initiative, check out this recording of the PulseCheck session that our CEO Nick Mehta and DoubleDutch CCO Annie Tsai led.

  • January 20, 2017
  • Allison Pickens
  • 3 Comments
  • Customer Segmentation, _Customer Success

The CCO’s Guide to Managing through Hypergrowth

Allison Pickens is VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at Gainsight.

I remember when I joined Gainsight in January 2014. We were working in a loft above a bar, which shared our address on Castro Street. When clients came to see us, they would sometimes go to the bar, only to be directed by the bartender to walk around the corner and up the narrow staircase to find our office.

At the time, we had just raised our Series B round, on a dream that a “Customer Success movement” might be in the making and that we could help. We’ve grown a fair bit since then, but—to be totally honest—this journey hasn’t exactly been a cake walk. Hypergrowth is a mountain that only gets steeper as you climb. And we’re probably 5% of the way up. We’ve made it to this point because, above all, we love the climb so much that we keep putting one foot in front of the other.

In past blog entries, I’ve shared many of the initiatives that have enabled our Customer Success organization to evolve to this point. Today I want to step back and reflect on a broader philosophy for managing through hypergrowth in a CS organization. Here are the 7 principles that I try to follow.

1. Conquer uncertainty.

Through the haze of retrospection, you might look at our journey and say it was inevitable, predictable. Anyone at Gainsight can tell you that wasn’t true. And I can’t predict with absolute precision what next year will be like. But it’s my job to instill confidence in my team and our company. So I’m always thinking about how to conquer uncertainty and make the business as predictable as possible, while preserving room for creativity.

One way I try to foster a predictable environment is by sharing with my team the metrics that guide our investments as we scale. Those include our Cost to ARR ratio, utilization, and others. Folks want to know when we can hire the next person, to relieve the seemingly ever-increasing workload.

The team also wants to know how we’re doing. We’ve found it helpful to schedule a quarterly All Hands to review my portion of our board deck and allow plenty of time for questions. And team leaders publish weekly updates to Chatter.

Yet, as hard as we try to bury uncertainty, we know that the unexpected will resurface. At the very least, we can be certain that this is an adventure, so let’s make it a fun one. That’s where karaoke comes in.

2. Create a vision…and talk about it all the time.

My parents, brother, and I used to take long road trips from Philadelphia to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. During those 8 hours, inevitably someone would get carsick. My parents would always say, “Focus on a steady point on the horizon.”

Through the vicissitudes of hypergrowth, teams want to know: what’s that constant mission that I can fixate on?

In our case, our mission in Customer Success at Gainsight is to “Carry the Torch.” Picture the person at the Olympics opening ceremony who literally carries the torch and leads a procession. By analogy, it’s an existential imperative at Gainsight that our Customer Success team leads the industry. (I shared this with a customer recently, and he said, “That’s a better way of saying that you eat your own dog food.”)

Carrying the Torch means that our team strives to serve as an incubator for best practices—to explore, vet, discard, pilot, refine, and then share ideas with the industry. We’re not perfect, but we get up every morning for our customers.

3. Clarify what counts as success.

One of my responsibilities as an executive is to communicate the standards set by the market, to clarify what counts as success. Every time I meet with a client or present to the board, I get feedback from the market. I aim to be transparent with the team about what I’m hearing, so that we can strive to achieve those standards. There’s an external definition of success.

At the same time, Customer Success is a relatively new field, which means we can’t just react to what the market is telling us. I find the best CS teams educate the market on how to evaluate them. Our team has identified metrics that measure our success and broadened awareness of them across our leadership team and board.

Those metrics help us prioritize efforts—which is critical for us, given that we literally could be working on 100 initiatives right now if we had the resources. (Our CS Operations’ team backlog is probably at least this long.) If an initiative isn’t going to drive one of our key metrics in a meaningful way, let’s scrap it.

4. Execution matters.

As the mountain gets steeper, a false step causes you to stumble farther. Execution matters in this stage. That’s why we are constantly building new processes, to prevent ourselves from making the same mistake twice.

That said, perfectionism can be crippling. It can prevent us from living in the moment, from tapping our creative pipes, from being emotionally present for others. I don’t want a team of perfectionists. I do hope for us that we strive for continuous improvement, that we learn from our mistakes, and that we’re never satisfied.

Perfectionism is a mistake for another reason. It assumes a fixed standard, a box that we can check. The reality is that as we grow, the hurdles get higher. So I say: Let’s keep attempting to surmount those hurdles, with the knowledge that we’ll never be perfect hurdle-jumpers but can always try harder.

5. Exhale positivity.

One of my most deeply held beliefs in life is that when you exhale positivity, it will circle back to you in the breeze. I believe we can do anything that we believe we can.

I share with my team: Every single time we have set our minds to making something happen, we make it happen. It’s okay that we haven’t done something before. I believe we can do it.

Our CEO Nick Mehta once said, being in a startup is like digging for oil. And we can debate about exactly where in this oil field we will strike a reservoir, but we can’t debate this: Oil does exist somewhere.

There is always a path to success. I want to hear a ton of ideas from my team on all the possible paths, and we should discuss these vigorously. But we should agree that we will always assume a viable path exists.

6. Learn constantly.

Every Monday I come to work and realize that our company has changed from last week.

That means that every week we need to learn something new. In fact, it’s our obligation to evolve our skill set to meet the changing demands of our market. And managers need to coach our team members to help them develop in the right direction. If each team member is growing at least as fast as the company, we’re doing great.

Every quarter, I create a personal development plan for myself. This quarter I shared that plan with my team, because I wanted to show that all team members—even (and maybe especially) executives—need to continuously invest in improving themselves.

Our company recently introduced a new value, “Shoshin,” which is a concept in Zen Buddhism that means “beginner’s mind.” I love this new value because it reminds us of the humility required to constantly adapt to the demands of hypergrowth.

7. Express gratitude.

All day long, my team talks about what we can do better. We are our own toughest critic.

It’s equally important to recognize what has gone well. We are extremely lucky—we need to count our blessings. We’re grateful for the support from the Customer Success industry. We’re indebted to the other teams at Gainsight. We’re fortunate to have some money in the bank.

I’m also grateful that my team has fought for every inch our company has grown. They’ve battled discouragement in trying times, hunkered down in late nights, found creative sparks in darkness, and supported each other in rebounds. They’ve earned it. It’s my job to celebrate them.

Thank you, team, for a wonderfully memorable 2016 🙂 Cheers to the new year to come.

  • December 20, 2016
  • Allison Pickens
  • No Comments
  • _Customer Success

How We Drive Advocacy at Gainsight

Allison Pickens is VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at Gainsight. Will Robins is on the Business Operations team at Gainsight.

Generating advocacy is one of the most important parts of the CSM role. Why is that?

Advocacy reduces your cost of sales. Think about it: when your happy customers spread the word about your product, prospective customers will sign up more quickly. That means your Sales team doesn’t have to spend as much time trying to close them.

A reduced cost of sales leads to a higher profit margin, which leads to a higher valuation — the queen of all metrics.

And your CSMs are uniquely positioned to turn your customers into advocates of your company. In my blog post on Training for Managers of CSMs, I discussed the virtuous valuation cycle that successful CSMs propel through advocacy.

So how can you help your CSMs turn your customers into advocates?

1. Deliver Value

We track our customers’ business objectives and identify steps to achieve them through Success Plans in our instance of Gainsight. You can learn more about how we use Success Plans to achieve predictable value delivery here.

2. Demonstrate Value

We then discuss with the customer the value that they’ve achieved with our product during Executive Business Reviews. You can learn more about that process here.

3. Create Advocacy Targets

Our CSMs have quarterly targets for advocacy engagements. I described the types of advocacy that they get credit for here. Once a customer has achieved value, we give them the opportunity to talk about it!

Types of customer advocacy we give credit for are:

  • Sales references
  • Testimonials (case studies, webinars, online reviews)
  • Speaking at events
  • Providing a referral
  • Repeat purchasers (when a sponsor moves to a new company and buys your product again)

4. Identify Likely Advocates

Our CSMs identify “CSQAs” (Customer Success Qualified Advocates). These advocacy leads are customers who are interested in discussing the value they’ve achieved from Gainsight. Our CSMs provide those leads to Customer Marketing, who works with the customer on completing an advocacy event, such as a webinar, case study, or speaking engagement.

We’ve created an “Advocacy Potential” Scorecard to aid CSMs in identifying CSQAs. This measure averages the following different Scorecards that capture healthy usage, sentiment, value achieved, engagement, and willingness to advocate:

  • Habits: Our way to measure sticky adoption
  • Sentiment: Turns Red when the CSM creates a manual Sentiment Risk CTA
  • Success Plan Progress: Calculates a value for any Success Plan Objective based on whether the status is complete/incomplete and on-time/overdue (uses a custom field on the CTA object). Field values then get averaged and loaded to a Scorecard using a Rule
  • Community Activity: Sets a Score based on the number of threads the customer has created in our Community in the past 6 months; more posts means a healthier score
  • NPS: Averages our NPS Scores for key sponsors from the past 6 months
  • 3rd Party Reviews: Averages Reviews posted on 3rd Party Review sites that are sent to us in CSV format and loaded into a custom SFDC object on a monthly basis
  • Advocacy History: More details on this in Section 7

The CSM can easily look into the details of these respective Scorecards on C360 if they would like to do further research.

advocacy-potential

survey-nps

5. Manage Sales References

When our Sales team requests a Customer Reference for one of their prospects, they log a CTA in Gainsight for our Customer Marketing team. Customer Marketing then uses a “Reference Research Table” that we’ve created in Report Builder to identify similar, healthy customers.

manage-sales-references

Once a potential match is identified, Customer Marketing uses a “Customer Reference” playbook to coordinate with the CSM and AE and push a reference to completion. You can download this Playbook from Vault here.

customer-references

6. Record Advocacy Events

For every advocacy event that occurs, our Customer Marketing team logs a Milestone in Gainsight. We use a few different Milestone types to capture the nature of the advocacy, such as a Reference Call or a Speaking Engagement.

For Customer References, we no longer need to manually create the Milestone. Marketing inputs a few basic details about the call (date, Account & Contact who provided the reference) on the prospect’s Opportunity, and a Rule then automatically creates the Milestone. The added benefit of having reference call data on the Opportunity is that we can easily report on how many closed/won or pipeline dollars have been influenced by references (more details on that here).

references

closed-arr

7. Assess Advocacy Level

We’ve created a “Recent Advocacy” Scorecard to give a top level view of recent advocacy activity in our customer base. This measure is based on the number of advocacy Milestones in the past 12 months. More Milestones mean a higher score.

It’s quick to do additional research on the customer’s advocacy history by viewing the Milestones in C360.

recent-advocacy

advocacy-level

8. Report on Advocacy

Since all advocacy events get recorded as Milestones, reporting is very simple. We can see advocacy events over a given timeframe, by customer segment, or by CSM. We are also able to see which customers have completed the most advocacy events (which can be a risk for fatigue).

We consider advocacy events per quarter to be an extremely important metric, so much so that we report it each quarter to our Board.

report-on-advocacy

Vault Assets mentioned in this post

(for Gainsight customers only)

Here are downloadable versions of what you’ve seen in this post.

  • Customer Reference Playbook

If you’d like to learn more about how to implement Business Processes in your organization, check the section of Gainsight Go, check out the Vault (with over 250+ ready to import Playbooks, Email Templates, Surveys and Rules), pose a question on Community, or contact your CSM. Follow Allison’s blog posts on Twitter at @PickensAllison.

  • October 18, 2016
  • Allison Pickens
  • No Comments
  • Advocacy & Cross-sell/Upsell, Best Practices, Gainsight on Gainsight, _Customer Success

How We Work With Our Product Team

Allison Pickens is VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at Gainsight. Special thanks to Gaurav Kotak, Will Robins, and Elena Painter for contributing to this blog post.

Customer Success leaders typically want to collaborate more effectively with other departments in their organization. Even though CS departments are accountable for the renewal rate in many cases, they usually don’t have full control over the attainment of that outcome. They rely on other departments for their role in contributing to outcomes for customers.

CS leaders must align with the Product department in particular to be successful in their roles. Here’s how my CS organization aligns with Product at Gainsight.

Product Risk Process

If you’ve read my blog post on risk management, you’ll know that we track 8 fundamental types of risk in our customer relationships. One of those is Product Risk: when a customer cannot get sufficient value from the product unless an enhancement is made.

When a CSM escalates a Product Risk, this kicks off a formal process outlined in a Product Risk playbook.

product-risk-process

We use a new CTA Type called “Product Risk” for these risks and apply a playbook to outline the steps (tasks) for the CSM to carry out. As a result, we can display relevant details about the Product Risk directly within the CTA view.

Product Risks are an effective way to escalate a requested enhancement from a customer. However, it is important to be selective about when to flag a Product Risk. At Gainsight, we only raise a Product Risk when a lack of a feature is causing a customer to receive insufficient value from Gainsight. A risk can only be flagged for Strategic and Enterprise customers; SMB customers must receive an exception from management to create an escalated Product Risk. That said, SMB customers are among our most vocal partners as we improve the product, and we LOVE to gather their feedback in our Community, described below.

Flagging too many Product Risks can result in: (1) a stretched Product team that handles a large volume of risks but doesn’t follow up with any of them with sufficient effort; and/or (2) a Product team that dedicates too little time to break-through innovation. That said, we usually see Customer Success teams flagging too few risks to their Product teams, not too many.

Our Product team also aspires to proactively learn about customers’ needs and incorporate them into the product planning process. Here is how the Customer Success team works with Product team to achieve this:

Community

It is impossible for our Product team to engage one-on-one with every client. Our online Community allows us to gather feedback from our customers at scale. Customers post their ideas to Community, and our Product team responds directly to their posts to learn more.

Gathering product enhancement requests on Community enables us to analyze the requests that are common to many customers. Community participants can “upvote” product ideas; enhancement requests that appear most often or that have the most “upvotes” are prioritized on the product roadmap.

On Community, the Product team can easily engage with customers to better understand their requirements and provide features that align perfectly. Over the past 6 months, Product Managers and CSMs have participated in 91% of the posts on Community. Most posts are responded to within 48 hours.

On a monthly basis, the Product team leaders review and update the product roadmap. Team members ensure that customers are regularly updated regarding their requests via Community.

community

If you haven’t signed up on Community yet, do that here!

Themes from CSMs

Our Product team can gather detailed information on customer requirements from 1-on-1 conversations and Community. But our CSMs can also help the Product folks identify themes across customers, given that CSMs are interacting with customers all day, every day. Moreover, customers may be willing to share sensitive feedback with the CSM that they would not share publicly on our Community. (We’d still encourage you to share it on Community, though!)

As a result, our Product team organizes a monthly meeting for CSMs to share their observations about patterns across customers’ use of Gainsight.

Themes from Support

Our Support team interacts with our customers everyday too, and often have valuable perspectives on features requested through Support tickets. Although the Support team encourages all customers to voice their requests via Community, the Product team holds a bi-weekly meeting for Support to discuss broad themes.

SME Program

We want to make sure that Gainsters with a variety of perspectives offer feedback on the product. For example, while a CSM might lend an interesting perspective on the usability of Gainsight for end users, a Solutions Architect might have a perspective specific to the configurability of Gainsight for an admin.

Our Subject Matter Expert (SME) program connects our Product sub-teams, each of which focuses on a different part of the product, with people across different roles in our Customer Success organization. Each SME team meets once every two months, with the following agenda:

  • Product Feature Update (20 minutes): Overview of trending usage stats, recently released enhancements/functionality and bug fixes
  • SME Examples (20 minutes): Review of challenges faced by customers related to a feature, and proposed solutions
  • Feedback on Roadmap: Review the upcoming roadmap and reprioritize, add or remove proposed features based on SME feedback

Sometimes, if we strike on a very juicy subject, we hold a follow-up meeting with certain SMEs and Product Managers to deep dive on specific issues.

If you’d like to learn more about how to implement Business Processes in your organization, check the Business Processes section of Gainsight Go, check out the Vault (with over 250+ ready to import Playbooks, Email Templates, Surveys and Rules), pose a question on Community, or contact your CSM. Follow Allison’s blog posts on Twitter at @PickensAllison.

  • October 3, 2016
  • Allison Pickens
  • 1 Comment
  • Best Practices, _Customer Success

How We Track the ROI of Our CS Team

Allison Pickens is VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at Gainsight. Special thanks to Julia Guyadeen (Director of Product Marketing) and Will Robins (Business Operations) for contributing to this blog post.

For documentation on how to configure the reports in this blog and accompanying Vault Assets, links are provided throughout and at the bottom of this post. Admin permissions are needed to view and download the Vault Assets.

Have you ever found yourself in a meeting with your CFO, in which s/he questions whether giving you more budget is worthwhile?

And have you ever struggled to identify metrics that justify your investment in Customer Success?

I hear from Customer Success leaders about this situation all the time. It’s critical that we as leaders identify metrics that show our teams are contributing to our companies’ revenue. Here’s how we do it at Gainsight. For dashboards we’ve configured in our own instance of Gainsight, flip to the end of this post.

Part 1: Know Your Value Drivers

CSM teams are often held accountable for the renewal rate, but they don’t always get full credit for it. A CFO might claim (probably incorrectly) that the renewal rate would have been the same even if investment in CSM had been lower. It’s important to identify metrics that CSMs can say they’re directly responsible for.

Even if it’s generally accepted that CSMs contribute to higher Retention, it’s not always generally accepted that CSMs contribute to Expansion. It’s even less commonly accepted that CSMs contribute to New Business. At Gainsight, we’re big believers in the notion that CSMs contribute to all 3 forms of revenue. Here’s how:

revenue-attributable-to-customer-success

Retain

CSMs can improve renewal rates by “saving” customers and helping customers “win”.

CSM “Save” means a turnaround. When a customer is in a Red state, according to one of our 8 Scorecard Measures, and the CSM brings them to Yellow state (indicating a level of normalcy), we call that a Save.

CSM “Win” means bringing the customer from a normal, Yellow state to an excellent, Green state. This might mean moving the customer into Green or Lime Habits, which is our word for sticky adoption, and which is captured by one of our 8 Scorecard Measures.

In each case, the CSM makes the customer more likely to renew.

Some customers may have an “Opt Out” in their contract. It grants the customer the option to cancel their contract after a set amount of time. Customer Success is then responsible for ensuring the customer finds value and does not Opt Out.

Expand

CSM Wins also increase the chance of upsell. When a customer is adopting the product meaningfully and getting value, they’re more likely to explore new use cases with you.

CSQLs are analogous to SQLs in Sales. SQLs stand for “Sales Qualified Leads” and refer to leads that sales development representatives (often cold-callers) pass along to account executives on the Sales team.

In the same way, CSQLs are “Customer Success Qualified Leads” and refer to expansion leads that CSMs pass along to Sales. Given that CSMs interact with customers all the time, they’re in a good position to identify opportunities to sell a product add-on or expand into a new department. CSMs should not only get credit for the leads they pass along; they should be expected to do so, in order to reduce your cost of upsell.

Thanks to Romeo Leon, VP of Customer Success at CrowdFlower, for coining the term CSQL.

new-business-vs-expansion-funnel

Moreover, some CSMs have upsell quotas – which allows them to directly contribute to the top line.

Finally, when an AE sells a proof-of-concept (i.e. POC, or trial period) to a customer, often the CSM is responsible for making that POC successful. If the POC converts to a full deal, the CSM should get credit.

Land

CSMs can help land new business in several ways.

First, we’ll introduce the concept of a CSQA, or Customer Success Qualified Advocacy. Examples include:

  • A customer collaborating on a case study that captures a new use case for your product/service,
  • A customer offering a written testimonial that could be posted on your website or in your sales materials, or
  • A customer speaking at an event that your prospective customers are attending.

In all 3 cases, the customer shares the benefits of your product/service with a broader audience of prospects. The CSM should get credit for developing the customer relationship to the point where they’re willing to advocate for your company to prospective customers.

We call this “CS Qualified Advocacy” because the Marketing team must validate that the customer is willing to complete the advocacy engagement and then actually does so. Much like in the case of CSQLs, there is a hand-off from one function (CSM) to another function (Marketing) that confirms the “lead.”

Similarly, if a customer speaks to a prospect directly – i.e. provides a Sales Reference – your CSM has helped drive new business by driving advocacy.

When a customer proactively refers a prospect to your company, e.g. by making an introduction, we recognize the CSM’s effort in making that customer so successful that they’re willing to make a referral.

Repeat purchasers involve a customer of your product moving to a new company, where they choose to buy your product again. A CSM made the customer so successful the first time that they wanted to come back to you.

For more strategic segments, your CSMs may be directly involved in the sales cycle to share best practices, success stories, or to help outline the customer’s journey after the sale. The CSM serves as a trustworthy partner that can help bring the deal to signature.

Finally, when a CSM delivers a form of revenue-generating Advisory Services, they’re contributing to the top line in another way. For example, some companies have a high-touch form of Customer Success (e.g. “Premier Customer Success”) that they charge customers for.

Part 2: Build Dashboards

Now that we have an understanding of the ways in which CSMs drive revenue, how do we actually prove it to our CFO? Below are the reports we built in our own instance of Gainsight.

Note: These reports require significant customization to objects in Salesforce and the Gainsight Standard Package. See links to documentation for how to configure these reports at the bottom of this post, or reach out to your CSM or Account Executive to inquire about how we can help you set these up.

(All data shown below is illustrative, and does not represent real Gainsight financial data.)

Retain

(Configuration documentation and Vault Assets)

Closed Renewal ARR Associated with a CSM “Save” (Vault Report). We’ve tracked the renewals from last quarter that happened after a “Save” (improvement from Red to Yellow health). It’s very possible these Renewals would not have come in if not for the change in health that was enabled by Customer Success.

closed-renewal-arr-associated-with-csm-save

Closed Renewal ARR Associated with a CSM “Win” (Vault Report). We’ve also tracked the Renewals from last quarter that happened after a “Win”. A CSM “Win” means bringing the customer from a normal, Yellow state to an excellent, Green state.

closed-renewal-arr-associated-with-csm-win

ARR of Saved Opt Outs (Vault Report). Some of our customers have an “Opt Out” in their contract. It grants the customer the option to cancel their contract after a set amount of time. Customer Success is then responsible for ensuring the customer finds value and does not Opt Out.

arr-of-saved-opt-outs

Expand

(Configuration documentation and Vault Assets)

Closed Upsell ARR of CSM-Generated Leads (Vault Report). In addition to tracking who closed the deal, we’ve focused on the source of the lead. If it’s a lead generated through an outbound CSM effort, then we’ve included it here. Leads generated through Sales, Marketing or an inbound request are not included. Sales Reps are required to fill out the Upsell Lead Source before they close the deal.

closed-upsell-arr-csm-gen-leads

Closed Upsell ARR Associated with a CSM “Win” (Vault Report). A rise in health can pave the way for an upsell. We’ve tracked last quarter’s upsells that happened after a “Win.”

closed-upsell-arr-associated-with-csm-win

Converted POC ARR (Vault Report). Sometimes, Customer Success needs to bring a deal across the finish line through a short-term Proof of Concept. The report shows the customers that were nurtured from POC to a “full” customer.

converted-poc-arr

Land

(Configuration documentation and Vault Assets)

CSQA (Customer Success Qualified Advocacy) (Vault Report). The Marketing department converts CS identified advocacy opportunities into Webinars, Case Studies and Speaking Engagements. These get logged as Milestones and are captured here.

customer-success-qualified-advocacy

Closed ARR where a Customer Reference Call Occurred (Vault Report). At Gainsight, when a member of the Sales team requests a reference, it is coordinated by the CSM and our Marketing team. We’ve set up our reference tracking so that we can see how many closed/won dollars were influenced by a reference call in the Sales Cycle.

closed-arr-where-reference-call-occurred

Closed ARR where the Lead Source was a Customer Referral (Vault Report). These are examples of our customers filling the “top of the funnel” for us. It’s the product of a vibrant customer community that the Customer Success team works hard to develop.

closed-arr-where-lead-source-customer-referral

Closed ARR from Repeat Buyers (Vault Report). These are examples of key sponsors that left a customer account and then became involved in the Gainsight Sales process at a prospect.

closed-arr-from-repeat-buyers

Closed Premier CSM ARR & Advisory Services (Vault Report). These are 2 revenue streams that CSMs are directly responsible for. Premier CSM is a higher touch form of Customer Success, while Advisory Services represent consultative engagements beyond the normal scope of the CSM’s job.

closed-premier-csm-arr

Closed ARR where a CSM was Involved in the Sales Cycle (Vault Report). This one’s pretty self-explanatory – CSMs putting boots on the ground in prospect meetings to get the deal closed! Examples include:

  • Sharing best practices
  • Deep-diving on success stories from similar customers
  • Helping map their post-sale journey

closed-arr-where-csm-involved-in-sales-cycle

Tracking how Customer Success helps Retain, Expand and Land customers will be a strong compliment to the operational metrics that your Customer Success org is already responsible for. In some cases, these revenue metrics can be quarterly goals themselves. If you’d like to build these reports, we have configuration documentation available here: Retain, Expand, Land. For further help, reach out to your Gainsight Customer Success resource or Account Executive. The next time you need to show the value your Customer Success team is delivering, knock it out of the park!

Vault Assets mentioned in this post

(for Gainsight customers only)

Here are downloadable versions of what you’ve seen in this post. For additional information on the necessary custom fields, check out the Retain, Expand & Land documentation.

  • Closed Renewal ARR Associated with a CSM “Save”
  • Closed Renewal ARR Associated with a CSM “Win”
  • ARR of Saved Opt Outs
  • Closed Upsell ARR of CSM-Generated Leads
  • Closed Upsell ARR Associated with a CSM “Win”
  • Converted POC ARR
  • CSQA (Customer Success Qualified Advocacy)
  • Closed ARR where a Customer Reference Call Occurred
  • Closed ARR where the lead source was a Customer Referral
  • Closed ARR from Repeat Buyers
  • Closed Premier CSM ARR & Advisory Services
  • Closed ARR where a CSM was involved in the Sales Cycle

If you’d like to learn more about how to implement Business Processes in your organization, check the Business Processes section of Gainsight Go, check out the Vault (with over 250+ ready to import Playbooks, Email Templates, Surveys and Rules), pose a question on Community, or contact your CSM. Follow Allison’s blog posts on Twitter at @PickensAllison.

  • August 26, 2016
  • Allison Pickens
  • 3 Comments
  • Best Practices, _Customer Success

5 Ways to Be a Brand Ambassador in Customer Success

Allison Pickens is VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at Gainsight.

At Gainsight, our brand is quite important to us. You probably know this already if you’ve attended our annual Pulse conference — which has featured a Taylor Swift impersonator, choreographed Disney song rip-offs, and a cappella groups. This past May, I was accompanied on stage for my keynote address by a panther and a bear – not real ones, though, for better or worse.

Our Marketing team is definitely our “brand steward” – a terrific term I learned recently from a CMO who attended our Gainsight breakfast in Boston. The term steward conveys Marketing’s role in laying out the vision for the brand, so that other employees can help bring that brand to fruition through their myriad of communication channels, ranging from social media to customer calls. Given our Customer Success team’s constant interactions with customers, we have numerous opportunities to convey Gainsight’s personality – with the goal of cultivating a top-notch customer experience.

Here are 5 ways that our Customer Success team members serve as brand ambassadors.

1. Gsnap

Our latest release showcased a new feature that we’re incredibly excited about. (This is my personal favorite.) Gsnap allows you to record short videos of yourself and send them to customers. In just a couple of minutes, you can send your smiling face to a customer that needs a big welcome, a suggestion, or a pick-me-up. One of our values at Gainsight is Childlike Joy – meaning that we aspire to make “work” and “play” the same thing. We don’t want to take ourselves too seriously and we want to enjoy the journey with our customers. Gsnap helps us convey Childlike Joy to them.

Here are some examples for how we use Gsnap internally:

  1. I’ve used Gsnap to congratulate customers on launching Gainsight to their end users during Onboarding.
  2. I’ve also used Gsnap to reach out to prospective customers who are in the later stages of evaluating our product. I want them to know they’ll be welcomed with open arms once they buy our product.
  3. Our CSM team uses Gsnap to send out follow-ups to NPS surveys.
  4. Our CSM team uses Gsnap to congratulate sponsors on a promotion.

gsnap

If you’d like to learn how to use Gsnap, let us know! We recently led a webinar on the subject as well (PPT).

2. CoPilot Outreaches

We’re avid users of CoPilot for our 1:many program. We incorporate Childlike Joy wherever possible. Some examples:

  • Competitions for Gainsight Swag: Keep an eye out for chances to win Gainsight swag in our customer communications! Some recent examples include a Vault Asset download competition and T-shirt give-away.
  • Success Express Emails: We admit that these used to be a bit dry and long. We recently revamped the emails that go out to attendees of our Express onboarding workshop to be more playful and succinct.
  • Fun Vault Templates: We’ve gotten creative with some of the Email Templates in Gainsight Vault. Check out the “Meet Your Executive Team” example below.

copilot-outreaches

3. Groc

If you haven’t yet read Tales of Groc, check it out. This was the creation of one of our Business Operations team members, Will Robins, who loves to write. I mentioned that I wanted to do more “Childlike Joy things” for our customers, so he came up with the story of a caveman named Groc who lived in the “Stone Age” of Customer Success but gradually learns best practices. Puns include:

  • The first “mobile platform”, which is a wood plank that moves on wheels.
  • A pile of support “logs”, a collection of birch logs where Groc’s support team scribbles their updates.
  • Groc attending a session titled “How to Set Fire to Product Adoption”, hosted by wood subscription service Splintr.

groc

4. This Blog

If you’ve read some of our blog posts, you’ll know that we’re an active participant in the thought leadership and evangelism of Customer Success. This is partly because we want to live up to one of our values at Gainsight: Success for All, which encourages an open sharing of knowledge. We are frequently inspired by how our customers tackle their business challenges, so we want to give back and share some of our own ideas and solutions.

We’ve blogged about a range of topics, including our Post-Sales Organizational Charter, the Value of CS Ops, Renewals & Expansion, the ROI of Customer Success and How to be a Manager of CSMs. As best practices and thought leadership continue to develop in Customer Success, we’re eager to be part of the discussion.

5. Webinars

We host weekly webinars on topics ranging from Survey Strategy to Organizational Structure. There’s no way I personally could host all of those webinars – and there are certainly benefits to me not doing it. It opens up the opportunity for our team members, including individual contributors and managers, to rotate the responsibility of hosting.

In allowing lots of folks to take ownership, we’re sharing with our customers our third company value, Success for All – meaning, we want all stakeholders (customers, employees, and investors) to benefit from every action we take. The team members who host webinars have the opportunity to share their expertise publicly, furthering their careers, and our customers have the benefit of hearing perspectives from lots of different folks.


If you’d like to hear how other Customer Success teams are serving as brand ambassadors, comment on this post on our Community.

If you’d like to learn more about how to implement Business Processes in your organization, check the Business Processes section of Gainsight Go, check out the Community, or contact your CSM. Follow Allison’s blog posts on Twitter at @PickensAllison.

  • August 17, 2016
  • Allison Pickens
  • No Comments
  • Best Practices, _Customer Success

How to Define Your Customer Success Organizational Charter

customer success team members helping to build strategy together

As more and more companies wake up to the value of positive user experiences, they’re racing to build out their customer success teams.

Unfortunately, if you’re a leader who’s in charge of spearheading customer success and you don’t have clear customer success organizational charters guiding you, your world may feel a bit chaotic.

We’re here to help you build a stable launchpad to skyrocket past your customer success goals. Here’s how to define your customer success organizational charter and build a well-oiled customer success machine.

Why Define Customer Success Charters?

Your company has a lot to gain by establishing customer success charters. After all, 80 percent of customers now say the experience a company delivers is as important as products and services. Customer success charters focus those valuable efforts and provide paths to long-term product-led success. They bring your team together, line up roles and responsibilities, and ensure everyone is moving in the right direction.

What’s more, chiseling out lanes and a direction helps you focus on customer-centric results. That means your product is actively supporting customer success and staying centered on the customer as it grows.

Ready to get started? Here are a few ways to pin down your customer success organizational charter:

First, Organize Your High-Level Customer Success Departments

It’s a good idea to start defining customer success charters by nailing down your high-level needs. Start by identifying your biggest customer needs. For instance, you might decide you need to manage outcomes, increase Time to Value (TTV), and provide solutions on-demand. From there, you’ll want to create departments to address each need.

Secrets to Crafting Your Customer Success Organizational Charters

Once you solidify your high-level org structure, you’ll want to create a charter for each function within those organizations. Here’s what to consider as you define each of your customer success charters:

Your Charter Mission

Nailing down each charter mission will help keep your plans focused and aligned. These don’t need to be manifestos. It’s best to keep them to one sentence to stay focused.

It’s also important that each mission addresses the customer’s need, not your company’s need. For instance, if you’re creating a charter for Customer Success Managers (CSMs), the mission might be to “Translate business objectives into real change and ROI for the client.” Keeping your mission customer-focused will ensure your decisions are putting their needs first—a recipe for product-led growth.

Determine Which Operating Metrics Define Success

Simply put, you can only measure what you can define. That’s why it’s important to decide what operating metrics will define success for each customer success function. These might be financial metrics, but chances are most of them won’t be. For the best results, choose operation metrics that check the following boxes:

  1. They influence the final financial outcomes you’re aiming for.
  2. They help you measure the success of your daily activities.
  3. They have the potential, perhaps with a little explaining from you, to be important to your CEO.

Establish Your Main Cost Metric

In this step, you’ll want to pick a cost metric that determines how to set a budget for the function. The metric should help you decide whether investing in this area will result in a positive ROI.

Although this can be an important part of many customer success charters, cost metrics may not fit every team. For instance, you may decide to invest in  Customer Success Operations the way you would if you’re hiring engineers. Basically, in some cases, you’ll be making an upfront investment that will help the rest of the organization scale down the line.

List Key Activities

Take some time to list the essential activities that will help you achieve the mission of each customer success function. That means laying out what you think each team should do. One efficient way to do this is to use a time analysis to figure out what teams are currently working on and any gaps sitting between teams.

Predict and Document Risks

You can plan for challenges by identifying and addressing any risks that could prevent each team from completing its mission. One way to do this is to write down all the things that can go wrong as you try to achieve your mission.

Identify How Teams Depend on One Another

A good way to start identifying dependencies is to ask each team or function, “In order to achieve your mission, what do you expect other teams to do?” By identifying dependencies, you’ll start seeing where there are communication breakdowns or misaligned expectations. For instance, you may see that Team A expects Team B to accomplish tasks that Team B doesn’t think is their job. Once you list out all of the dependencies, you’ll want to clear things up by nailing down what team should be doing which duties.

Keep Sharpening Your Customer Success Skills

These functions will provide the direction you need to create your customer success organizational charter. From there, you’ll have the tools to start climbing towards customer success and growth.

Want to uncover more ways to boost your customer success expertise? Register for our webinar CS Ops Unplugged to tap into expert advice from a community of customer success professionals.

  • June 14, 2016
  • Allison Pickens
  • 4 Comments
  • Best Practices, Customer Success, Customer Success Operations, _Customer Success

The Guide to Etiquette in Customer Interactions

Allison Pickens is VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at Gainsight. Matt Lindeman is VP of Customer Success at Guidespark.

When onboarding a new team member, it’s important to clarify your expectations for basic etiquette when working with customers. But this topic is often overlooked during new-hire training.

I’m excited to co-write this blog post with Matt Lindeman, VP of Customer Success at Guidespark. What follows is our guide to etiquette in customer interactions. Our hope is that you take this guide, adapt it as needed for your team, and then set up a training for them.

Many CSMs have a horror story about a customer call that went terribly wrong because of an etiquette “blooper.” Do any of these scenarios sound familiar?

Scenario #1: You’re on a conference call and the customer sounds exasperated. They’re saying, “We’ve told you this 3 times before,” and “Why didn’t you tell us that you’re not likely to meet the project deadline?” and “I want to see this fixed today or else I’m calling your CEO.” You too are exasperated because you believe that actually, the customer is partly at fault for the delays. Thinking that you’re on mute, you say to your colleague sitting next to you, “This customer needs to take a chill pill.” That’s when you realize that actually, you weren’t on mute at all!

Scenario #2: You are performing a QBR with one of your strategic accounts. After introductions, you start the meeting by asking the customer what their business goals are. Abruptly, the customer says, “Are we going to do this again? This is the third QBR we have had, and I have told you each time that we are trying to reduce cost by $1.3M next year. That is why I bought your solution, and I don’t understand why you are not documenting things and coming to these meetings unprepared. You are wasting my time!”

Scenario #3: During a customer call, you’re sharing your desktop to guide the conversation with a PowerPoint deck. While you’re presenting, a co-worker hits you with rapid-fire instant messages, asking for help on another customer’s situation. Trying to end the messaging, you quickly type, “On a call with customer, can’t talk.” But in a stroke of bad luck, you receive yet more messages from co-workers — and the customer can see all of them. Frustrated with the distraction, the customer says, “I don’t think I have your attention. Maybe we should re-schedule this meeting.”

Mistakes like these can damage permanently the customer’s perception of the CSM and of the vendor. And with ever-evolving technology, the likelihood of a communication mistake rises. Therefore, it’s increasingly critical that CSM teams establish a protocol for customer interactions. Here’s ours:

In Advance of a Customer Meeting: Agendas

  • Always have an agenda.
  • Never ask the customer what the agenda should be. Always propose the agenda, then ask if there’s anything they’d like to add or edit.
  • Send the agenda to the customer well ahead of time to ensure you’re covering the right topics. (Use your judgment to decide if e.g. a week or 2 days is the right amount of time.) If the meeting has been scheduled last minute, send it ASAP.
  • When in doubt, add structure. Even brainstorming sessions typically require a framework to organize the group’s thoughts and prevent the brainstorm from straying off topic. Providing customers a structure also gives them confidence in your leadership.
  • If you are leading the meeting, your default should be to prepare slides. Slides should recap the agenda you shared before the meeting, offer some structure to the conversation, and end with proposed next steps with an ETA.
  • Take time to list all the questions and reactions the customer may have. Prepare your answers in advance.
  • Budget your meetings for 25 minutes (rather than 30 minutes) or 50 minutes (rather than 60 minutes) so that the customer has time to join a subsequent meeting 5-10 minutes early. This will also ensure that you’re on time for your next meeting.

Right Before a Customer Call: Use Technology Properly

  • Have all your materials (e.g. PowerPoint) opened on your computer in advance.
  • Be careful what you’re showing on your screen if you plan to share it. Close any sensitive documents ahead of time.
  • Make sure all “pop-up” notifications (e.g. from Apple iMessages, Google Calendars, Google Chat, etc.) are closed or turned off before the start of your meeting.
  • Use video conferencing in order to build rapport.
  • Clarify in the invitation subject line whether the meeting is internal (just among members of your team) or external (with the customer). For internal meetings, label them “Internal”, as in “INTERNAL: Discuss project plan.” For external meetings, put the customer’s name in the subject line, as in “Guidespark/Gainsight Meeting.”
  • Use different passcodes for internal and external meetings. That way a client will never join your internal call accidentally.
  • Do not use video conferencing if you’re at home and don’t have a professional-looking home office (no one wants to see your laundry in the corner!)
  • Ensure that you have installed your video conferencing software properly. Make sure you learn how to use it before your meeting.
  • If you’re using a landline, mute your cell phone before the start of the meeting.

Starting a Conference Call

  • Start the web conference 5 minutes early. You should always be the first person to join the call.
  • Greet participants as they join the call. Tally who joins.
  • Know who the critical participants are. If a critical participant has not joined the call within 5 minutes of the start time, ask the group if it makes sense to reschedule.
  • If you want to record the call, ask the customer’s permission first.
  • Offer to record the call for any participants who couldn’t make the meeting.

Running a Meeting

  • Practice active listening. Paraphrase what the customer has said in order to show (and confirm) that you understand.
  • Mirror the customer’s cadence and intensity. For example, if they are in a rush, don’t spend a lot of time recapping prior meetings.
  • Use the customer’s name as much as possible when responding to them. This helps build rapport.
  • Take detailed notes. Unless you have a killer memory, you probably won’t remember every important detail.
  • Mark down who said what when taking notes.
  • Smile when you’re speaking. Even if you’re not using video, smiling actually makes your tone sound more positive — people can tell! If you need help smiling when you’re on the phone, tape a picture of a person smiling (or just a yellow smiley face) next to your monitor so you have someone to “smile back” at.
  • Be prescriptive. Offer your recommendation and tell the client when you believe they are going down the wrong path. They expect you to do this. Take the Challenger Approach.
  • Don’t interrupt the customer.
  • Mute your phone when you’re not talking. This prevents background noise from disrupting the call and also ensures that, if you decide to have a quick side conversation with another internal colleague in the same location, that conversation is not audible to the customer.
  • If there is background noise from another participant’s phone, but that participant is not talking, then suggest politely that they mute their phone.

Running a Meeting: Keeping Time

  • Check the clock every so often. Are you on schedule?
  • Leave sufficient time at the end of the call to summarize next steps and do the checks below. (Note: Schedule meetings for 25 and 50 minutes, as mentioned above.)
  • Do not push a meeting past the scheduled ending time, especially if a customer has mentioned that they have a hard stop.
  • Don’t be afraid to end the call early if all agenda items have been completed. Customers will appreciate the time back in their schedule.
  • If a meeting is running long, pause at 5 minutes ‘til and ask the attendees if the conversation can be continued at a later time.
  • This might be obvious, but it’s worth noting: don’t indicate to a customer that you’re prioritizing another customer over them. Never tell a customer that you have to end a meeting or cannot join a meeting because you have to meet another customer. It’s better to say, “I’ll have to schedule more time with you because I have another appointment at the top of the hour”.

Wrapping up a Conference Call

  • Check for completion*: does anyone have anything else to say that has not yet been expressed?
  • Check for alignment: is everyone okay with where we ended up in this conversation?
  • Check for next steps: are we clear about who will take actions and when those actions will be finished?
  • Check for value: what value is the customer taking away from this conversation?
  • Check for acknowledgment: is there anyone we should acknowledge? At the very least, thank everyone for their participation.

* Axtell, Paul. Meetings Matter: 8 Powerful Strategies for Remarkable Conversations. Corvallis, OR: Jackson Creek, 2015. Print

After a Conference Call

  • When debriefing internally after the call, do not use the same conference line as for the customer meeting. Start a new conference call with a different passcode. This ensures a private, internal conversation.
  • Send a follow-up email to the group the same day as the call.
  • In the email, document the decisions you made. This helps keep customers on track and prevents them from reinvestigating areas they have already discussed.
  • Summarize the action items in succinct bullet points rather than paragraphs.
  • Clarify ownership and deadlines. Don’t worry about repeating what you agreed to during the meeting. The customer will appreciate the reminder and the fact that you’re on top of things.

If a Customer is Upset

  • Rehearse a talk track prior to getting on the phone. Anticipate the customer’s questions and reactions.
  • Give the customer enough time to release some of their emotion at the start of the meeting. Don’t jump into proposing solutions too quickly because they may not be receptive yet.
  • Acknowledge their emotions. “I understand that this has been a painful experience.”
  • Repeat back to them (in your own words) what you heard them say, to make sure you fully understood.
  • Reaffirm that you’re committed to the customer’s success and that you share their concerns.
  • If you or your company made a mistake, acknowledge the impact that the mistake had on the customer, apologize, and propose a way to compensate them for the pain they’ve incurred. (Check with your manager on what you’re able to offer the customer in different situations.)
  • Never add the word “but” at the end of an apology, e.g. “I’m sorry, but…”
  • Ask clarifying questions. “Is this solution acceptable to you?”
  • Don’t commit to a solution that you’re not sure will work. Your intention might be to help them, but the customer won’t appreciate you reversing your proposal later once you discover it’s not feasible.
  • If you can’t propose a thoughtful solution on the call, tell the customer that you will need a certain amount of time to investigate and respond. Specify the amount of time.

Emailing a Customer

  • Acknowledge receipt of their emails and give appropriate follow up responses. It’s okay not to have the answer on the spot, but it’s not okay to not respond.
  • Respond to all emails within 24 hours, and aim for same-day. In some higher-risk situations or with some strategic customers, you should respond as quickly as possible.
  • Be concise, but not abrupt. For example, don’t send one-word responses, since these can come across as curt or dismissive.
  • Use precise language and avoid jargon that the customer may not be familiar with.
  • Publish an “Out of Office” auto-response if you will not be available via email (due to e.g. PTO, sick, conference, training, etc.).
  • Clarify any misunderstandings via phone or in person, not by email. Rule of Thumb: If you have to go back and forth 2 or more times to clarify a point, arrange to jump on a call.
  • Don’t deliver unexpected bad news in an email. Try to deliver it live — in person is best, and a phone call is second best. (Whether you do this in person or on the phone may depend on your role.)
  • It’s better to proactively communicate a delay than to surprise the customer with one later. If a customer is waiting on a solution from you, and you’re delayed in figuring out the solution, email the customer an update ASAP and let them know you’re going to be delayed.
  • Use bullet-point formatting in an email whenever you’re writing more than a few sentences.

Onsite Meetings

  • Arrive at the customer office at least 10-15 minutes prior to the start time of the meeting.
  • Have an understanding of the A/V situation on-site. Ensure you are prepared with the appropriate connectors. Arrange access to the meeting room for set-up in advance of the start time.
  • If a meeting is during lunch or breakfast, arrange to have food available.
  • If a meeting is 2 hours or longer, consider bringing in special snacks or treats
  • Be polite and friendly to everyone in the customer’s office. Remember you are the representative of your organization, and likely the person they will think of when they reflect on your company.
  • Hand out your business card at the start of the meeting.
  • Collect others’ business cards and line them up in front of you, in the same order in which the customers are sitting. This will help you remember everyone’s name.
  • If you take notes on your computer, clarify from the start of the meeting that you want to reassure the customer you’re just taking notes and not checking email or otherwise distracted.
  • Mute your cell phone before the start of the meeting. Do not check it during the meeting.

Manage Your Mood

  • Come to every customer interaction with positive energy.
  • Develop a genuine interest and curiosity in customers’ questions and concerns.
  • If you’re not happy with your job, it will probably show in your customer interactions. Talk to your manager to correct what’s bothering you. Life is too short to not enjoy your job!
  • If you’re not happy in your personal life, this might affect your work, too. Make sure you compartmentalize negative energy in your life!

“Possibility Thinking”

  • The answer to “Can your product do XYZ?” is rarely black and white. Explain specifically what the product can and cannot do.
  • Be creative in designing solutions to customer problems while explaining what the trade-offs are.
  • If a customer asks for an accelerated timeframe, challenge yourself to find new ways to satisfy their expectation.
  • At the same time, don’t commit to something if you’re not sure you can do it.

Feel free to add suggestions for customer etiquette in the Comments section!

If you’d like to learn more about how to implement Business Processes in your organization, check the Business Processes section of Gainsight Go, check out the Vault (with over 150+ ready to import Playbooks, Email Templates, Surveys and Rules), pose a question on Community, or contact your CSM. Follow Allison’s blog posts on Twitter at @PickensAllison.

  • June 1, 2016
  • Allison Pickens
  • 3 Comments
  • Best Practices, _Customer Success

What to Do When a Customer Churns

Allison Pickens leads Customer Success at Gainsight. Thank you to Sonam Dabholkar, who leads one of our CSM teams, for contributing to this blog post!

Note to Gainsight Customers: This post contains links to Vault Assets you can import directly into Gainsight.

We are maniacal about Customer Success at Gainsight. And we expect this to result in an extremely high gross renewal rate.

Unfortunately, there are rare situations when our processes fail or the customer is subject to forces beyond our influence, and a customer churns. Yes, this has happened even at Gainsight!

Losing a customer is a very painful experience. It’s also a huge learning opportunity for everyone at our company.

The last time a customer churned, we followed a rigorous post-mortem process to investigate the root causes of why the customer churned and identify action items for each department at Gainsight. The goal? Ensure that the same situation never happens again. We never want to make the same mistake twice.

The CSM assigned to the churned customer scheduled a “Root Cause Analysis” meeting with the following Gainsight attendees:

  • CEO
  • Myself
  • Customer Success: Team Leader, CSM, and Account Manager who was responsible for the renewal
  • Onboarding Success: Team Leader, Project Manager, and Solutions Architect assigned to the customer during onboarding
  • Technical Success: Team Leader and Technical Support Analyst that worked with the customer
  • Sales: VP, Team Leader, and Account Executive that sold the deal
  • Product: VP and relevant Product Directors
  • Customer Success Operations

Before the meeting, the CS Team Leader worked with the CSM to prepare a short deck to guide the discussion. Then during the meeting, they shared the deck, guided the discussion, and captured notes and next steps.

Here was the agenda for the Root Cause Analysis meeting:

1. Customer Overview

We reviewed the summary section of the customer’s C360. We looked at their lifecycle stage, recent NPS, and overall health score. The goal was to get everyone at the meeting familiar with overall context to start.

customer-overview

2. Customer’s Journey

We reviewed the customer’s C360 Milestones section in Gainsight, discussing major developments on their journey with us and identifying if there were any delays or gaps as compared to our healthy customers.

customers-journey

3. Key Metrics

We reviewed their adoption over time, as well as their NPS ratings and comments. This gave us more insight into the customer’s journey.

We discussed a chart on Healthy Level Users (HLUs – these users are in Cockpit every day) and Daily Active Users (DAUs) during the last 6 months:

key-metrics

We also reviewed a chart on the usage of the top 10 users during the last 30 days:

top-10-user-usage

Then we discussed their NPS ratings and comments:

nps-ratings

4. Risks

It was critical to identify the underlying reasons why the customer churned. It’s not enough to say “usage dropped after XYZ date” — WHY did usage drop? Was it preventable?

Our risk management framework shows a range of root causes for churn.

risk-mgt-framework

We had captured the presence of these risks in our relationship with the churned customer over time, using our Scorecard Measures. During the meeting, we reviewed those historical trends.

scorecard-measures

This data allowed us to figure out which of our risk processes broke down. From there, we pinpointed exactly where the breakage point was.

Note that the risk category itself doesn’t count as a root cause. The following are NOT examples of root causes:

  • Launch Risk: The customer didn’t make it through onboarding
  • Company Risk: Our executive sponsor left the company
  • Product Risk: The customer felt the product didn’t meet their needs
  • Other: The customer chose a competitor

These factors might have precipitated a risk, but the root cause lies in how you addressed that risk.

  • Why did the customer choose a competitor? Was it because, for example, you weren’t responsive to their requests?
  • Why did the departure of your exec sponsor precipitate the churn? Was it because, for example, you didn’t do a good job introducing the new sponsor to the product?
  • Why did the customer feel the product didn’t meet their needs? Was it because, for example, they didn’t get proper training?

Keep asking yourself “why” until you arrive at a root cause that (1) points to a systemic problem that (2) is actionable.

5. Surprise or Not?

Given all the data that we track, and given our rigorous processes to follow up on the data, a churn should never be a surprise. If we’re doing our job, every churn should fall into one of two categories:

(1) We knew it was coming and did everything we could to prevent it, or

(2) We knew it was coming and decided the customer wasn’t the right fit for our product — and could never be successful no matter what we did. In this case, we probably shouldn’t have sold to this customer in the first place, and we’ll make sure our Sales team has a better process in place to avoid this (see below).

If you’ve conducted a root cause analysis for several churns and discovered that #2 applies in each case, then you may have a Product-Market Fit problem. Organize a discussion with your company’s leadership team to figure out how to address it. You might be targeting the wrong type of customer, or you might be targeting the right type of customer (e.g. a new market you want to enter) in the wrong way.

6. Action Items

Having identified the root causes, we asked, “what do we need to do to prevent a similar situation from happening ever, ever again?”

In particular, we discussed these specific questions:

  • What CTAs should we add to detect this type of customer risk situation?
  • What other CSM processes do we need to put in place?
  • What Services offerings do we need to add?
  • What Product changes do we need to make?
  • What Sales qualification criteria should we add? What other processes can we institute to ensure that expectations are set properly in pre-sales?

Once we had our answers, each VP ensured that these were incorporated into their team’s initiatives for the quarter. Note that churn is a cross-functional problem; it’s the job of Customer Success to rally the company around the improvements required in order to prevent the churn.

After the meeting, we posted our learnings to the Chatter feed in Customer360 (which is our source of truth for notes on customers), so that our entire company learned why the churn occurred and the plays we’re pursuing as a result.

Bottom line: It’s important to drive to action rather than wallow in disappointment. Live, learn, and move forward.

And who knows? Perhaps the internal improvements you make as a result of the churn will help you win back the customer in the future!

Vault Assets mentioned in this post

(for Gainsight customers only)

Here are ready-to-use versions of what you’ve seen in this post:

  • Post-Churn Feedback Survey

If you’d like to learn more about how to implement these processes in your organization, check the Business Processes section of Gainsight Go, check out the Vault, pose a question on Community, or contact your CSM. Follow Allison’s blog posts on Twitter at @PickensAllison.

  • April 19, 2016
  • Allison Pickens
  • 7 Comments
  • Best Practices, Churn & Renewal Management, Gainsight Essentials, _Customer Success

Manager Training: How to Be a Great Manager of CSMs

Allison Pickens is VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at Gainsight

Note to Gainsight Customers: This post contains links to Vault Assets you can import directly into Gainsight.

So you just got promoted to lead a team of other CSMs. Congratulations! And don’t worry too much – we’re here for you.

Here’s a framework that encompasses the key skills a Manager should have: CAPES.

The name isn’t a coincidence; your CSMs are heroes to your customers and to your company – especially when battling the Churn Bot (see below). And as a Manager, you have to lead the pack.

capes_destroy_churnbot

CAPES stands for:

Coach
Aim
Create Predictability
Manage Escalations
Scale

Coach

To know how to coach a CSM, you need to have a strong sense of what their role should be. Here’s my definition of the role of CSM:

CSMs drive the valuation cycle.

csms-drive-valuation-cycle

Let’s walk through each step in this diagram.

Your CSM’s job begins from the moment your Sales team brings in a customer (New ARR). A CSM’s most basic responsibility is to manage risk – to be Reactive to customer escalations. In addition, over the past several years there’s been a big push in the CS industry to transform CSMs into more Proactive drivers of customers’ adoption of their product.

It’s not enough for customers to use your product, though; they actually need to derive value from that usage. To this end, your CSM must serve as a Challenger to your customers. I’m referring to a sales methodology called the “Challenger Sale,” described in a book by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson. The Challenger methodology is equally applicable to Customer Success, as I’ll describe below.

Being a Reactive/Proactive Challenger allows your CSM to pave the way for the Renewal, as well as Advocacy, which leads back to New ARR – whether in the form of upsell or new customers.

It’s the efficiency of this cycle that drives your company’s valuation. CSMs help increase your valuation as a multiple of revenue by (a) increasing your gross renewal rate and (b) reducing the cost of acquiring New ARR, by enabling organic upsell and increasing the likelihood that your existing customers acquire new customers for you (rather than your company investing more in sales and marketing).

So how should you coach your CSMs on each element of this valuation cycle?

1. Manage Risk (Reactive)

Tell your CSMs:

  • Never be surprised: Being blindsided on a call is an avoidable mistake.
  • Always know the next steps: Be prepared and explicit in stating these in conversations with your manager.
  • “Driver” mentality: Get it done! Drive to action!
  • Stay positive: In Customer Success more than in other functions, positivity is paramount because we handle so many tricky scenarios every day. Positive and negative energy are both contagious. One bad apple can ruin the atmosphere for the rest of the team.
  • Don’t wait too long to escalate: You won’t be blamed when something goes wrong. Escalating is the way that you mobilize resources for the customer’s benefit.

While we’re on the topic of “blaming”: It’s critical that a Manager withhold judgment on the root cause of the problem when a risk arises. There are 3 reasons for this: (a) the real cause is often not evident at first glance, (b) if you incorrectly blame your CSM, you may well alienate them, so you better be sure, and (c) you want to encourage CSMs to escalate risks; blaming them discourages it.

Here’s what a Risk Situation usually looks like:

csm-risk-situation

When you initially hear about the situation, you have inadequate information at your disposal (in orange). The information available to you may not completely coincide with the customer’s perception, which may be based on some real facts, but possibly not all the facts (since the customer may not have full knowledge of the problem), and possibly some incorrect data. Your CSM’s initial understanding of the problem is probably also limited for similar reasons and may not coincide with the customer’s perception.

Your job as Manager is to uncover the full scope of facts so that you can coach the CSM to choose the right path forward, to make sure the customer is fully aware of the situation and next steps, and to prevent the issue from happening again.

Always withhold judgment on who’s to blame until you have all the facts.

2. Drive Adoption (Proactive)

Tell your CSMs:

  • Follow a consistent process: There’s no excuse for not doing what’s proven to be best practice — unless your CSM has a cool idea, in which case, make it part of your process!
  • Never satisfied with “a good meeting”: Meetings are not ends in themselves. They’re only as valuable as their effect on your metrics. We’ve all had “happy ears” in meetings, meaning we hear positivity when we want to hear it. Believe the meeting is successful when you see tangible results.
  • Empower the customer: It’s easy to get into the trap of doing things for the customer. Teach them to fish. Tough love: It’s better for them.
  • Get creative: When you set adoption targets, it will force creative thinking. Encourage your CSMs to brainstorm tactics to drive adoption.

3. Demonstrate Value (Challenger)

Share with your CSMs some insights from the “Challenger Sale” methodology that I believe equally apply to Customer Success:

  • New and different view of the world: Customers expect their vendors to be thought leaders. Share new insights with them.
  • Understand the customer’s business model: What would make their business successful? How does your product support those business objectives?
  • Prescriptive with a vision: Customers want you to have an opinion.
  • Willing to push customers intellectually: Challenge a customer’s assumptions if you think they’re not serving him/her well. Guide the customer to the best approach, even if it’s not the most comfortable one.
  • Drive to real value: Usage isn’t value. Bridge the gap.

4. Renewal

  • Impact made well in advance: Saving a renewal last-minute is extremely painful and often impossible. Save yourself the stress by doing all the work upfront.
  • Ownership mindset: Sales might be completing the paperwork, but the CSM should feel that it’s their responsibility to get the renewal 99% of the way there.
  • Provide the right information: Set the Account Executive up for success.
  • Never blindside Sales: Make sure your notes in Gainsight are up-to-date.

5. Make Reference-able

We focus on a few types of advocacy activities that move the needle for us. The CSM talks to the customer about the opportunity and then connects them either with Sales or Marketing to complete the advocacy activity.

  • Sales Reference: Customer speaks to a prospective customer
  • Testimonial: Customer provides ROI metrics that show they’re getting measurable value
  • Event Participation: Customer speaks at an event that prospects attend

Aim

As a Manager, you’ll need to hold your team accountable for certain metrics. Certain day-to-day operational metrics contribute to longer-term financial ones:

operational-metrics

In addition, you’ll need to keep costs under control as you pursue these metrics. In particular, companies aim to spend less than 15 cents of fully-loaded CSM cost for every $1 of ARR. As a Manager, you have three levers to manage costs, shown on the right-hand side of the formula below.

fully-loaded-csm-cost-to-arr

You can learn more about how to manage these three levers here.

As a Manager, you should track your account ratios carefully through a chart like the one below, which shows ARR by CSM for each Manager (learn how to configure this report here):

account-ratios-report

Create Predictability

Ensuring predictable results for the metrics above requires new processes. And to implement a new process well, you’ll have to manage your team through change, which is sometimes difficult. We recommend creating routines for using Gainsight in order to foster process change.

Here are our best practices for managing through change using Gainsight:

Best Practice: Set clear expectations

  • CSMs should create a Success Plan for each customer after aligning on their objectives for the given period (e.g. the current quarter)
  • CSMs should check Cockpit every morning
  • Review Customer 360 dashboard before all customer calls and internal strategy meetings
  • Set specific usage goals (e.g. 5 Cockpit page views per week per CSM)

Best Practice: Positive reinforcement

  • Leverage Gainsight usage reports (reach out to your Customer Success resource to turn these on).
  • Offer prizes for top users
  • Send weekly Gainsight “spotlights” to the team (e.g. “Carrie saw her customers’ NPS improve by 10 points in the last quarter!”)
  • Point out the beneficial results from a CSM escalating a risk (“Great job – you preempted what might have turned into a bad situation!”), to encourage them to continue to raise the red flag

Best Practice: Run team meetings with Dashboards

  • Recognize top performers for certain metrics (e.g. Habits scorecard movement)
  • Highlight success stories that the metrics reveal
  • Review themes (e.g. NPS trends)

Best Practice: Run process meetings with Cockpit

  • At-Risk Customers Meeting — filter for Flagged Risk CTAs
  • Support Escalation Meeting — filter for Flagged Support Risk CTAs
  • Renewal Meeting with Sales — filter for Renewals CTAs

Best Practice: 1-on-1s

  • Review priorities using Flagged CTAs in Cockpit
  • Drill through to Customer360 when a question about a customer arises
  • Review overall trends in Green and Red customers using the Scorecard Dashboard

Best Practice: Enable Feedback

  • Hold weekly Office Hours with your Gainsight administrator for the team to offer feedback on how the new processes are working
  • “Close the Loop” by reporting back to your CSMs on how their feedback was addressed

Best Practice: Elevate Gainsight Power Users

  • Pair Power Users with new CSMs or less active Gainsight users to help the latter get up to speed

Manage Escalations

Executives need team managers to serve as the first line of defense when a CSM needs help with an escalation. (You can’t include a VP in every tricky meeting!) You can read more about our escalation process here.

You can reduce the likelihood of escalations by building relationships with executives at your customers in the following ways:

  1. Join Executive Business Reviews: Your CSM should lead the conversation, but you should plan to have an active speaking role.
  2. Meet new executive sponsors: When there’s a new executive at your customer, join the initial meeting.
  3. Regular executive check-in’s: Plan to check in with executives on a regular cadence. You can even set CTAs to remind you to do so.

You can read more about how we manage relationships with executives at our customers here.

Scale

Besides running the show day-to-day, you can play an important role in helping your boss build a scalable Customer Success organization. Here are three ways you can do that:

1. Focus on scalable assets

Instead of asking for headcount every time your CSMs get busy, ask for greater investment in scalable assets.

The most scalable asset is your Product. That’s because in one fell swoop, a single product change can make a massive difference across your customer base. Are your CSMs spending time “filling the gaps” in your Product by helping customers hack together solutions to their problems? Offer feedback to your Product team.

Your Community is the second-most scalable asset, since it allows customers to answer each other’s’ questions. Content comes next because it can be used again and again (up to a point). From there, Automated Outreaches set up by your Gainsight administrator in Copilot can allow you to distribute that Content in a smart way.

Focus on investing in the bottom of the period so that you can build a sustainable business.

invest-in-the-bottom-of-the-pyramid

2. Understand the root cause of high workload

To reduce workload, you have to understand how your CSMs are spending their time.

The Gainsight chart below allows you to see the number of Risk CTAs opened each month in different Risk categories (e.g. Support Risk, Sentiment Risk, Product Risk, and others.) In this particular chart, Support Risk CTAs represent a large percentage of the total. This should tell you that your CSMs are spending a lot of time following up with your Support team on escalated tickets. Instead of asking for more headcount, see if you can inspire your Support team to create better processes that improve ticket resolution time. Learn how to configure this chart here.

risk-ctas-chart

3. Drive cross-functional coordination

Your CSMs can’t resolve every customer issue by themselves. They’ll need help from other departments.

For any given customer scenario, a CSM should serve as the quarterback on behalf of the customer to get the required help from other departments. But as their Manager, you’ll need to develop strong relationships with your peers in other departments to help grease the wheels. You’ll need to present Customer Success as a company imperative – not just a function – in order to get help. You should also take the lead on proposing and implementing improvements in cross-functional processes.

csm-quarterback-for-customer-scenarios

Vault Assets mentioned in this post

(for Gainsight customers only)

Here are ready-to-use versions of what you’ve seen in this post:

  • ARR by CSM by Team Report
  • Flagged Risk CTAs Opened by Month Report

If you’d like to learn more about how to implement these processes in your organization, check the Business Processes section of Gainsight Go, check out the Vault, or contact your CSM. You can also send questions or feedback to Allison at apickens@gainsight.com. Follow her blog posts on Twitter @PickensAllison.

  • March 23, 2016
  • Allison Pickens
  • 5 Comments
  • Best Practices, Gainsight Essentials, _Customer Success

How We Reorganized Our Entire Post-Sales Organization to Drive Customer Success

Allison Pickens leads Customer Success at Gainsight.

I’m excited to announce a new organizational structure for Customer Success at Gainsight.

Our previous “post-sales” organizational structure consisted of separate Customer Success, Services, and Support teams, each with a VP reporting separately into our CEO. We’ve decided to merge those three teams into one organization, with Customer Success as the overarching objective.

I’m very excited to lead this combined team and to share with you the philosophy behind the changes that we’ve made.

Underlying Principles

We took a first-principles approach to designing this organization. Here are the principles behind the changes:

  1. Customer Success comes first. Our #1 goal in designing this new organization was to put customer outcomes first. It doesn’t matter if we’re resolving tickets or working on an onboarding project — our central mission is to drive customer success.
  2. Design the organization around customer needs. Teams should be defined based on the type of value they’re delivering to the customer — not based on the value to Gainsight.

    One example of this is that we’re removing the term “Services” from our organizational structure. “Services” is about what Gainsight gets from the relationship rather than about what the customer needs. (In addition, multiple parts of our organization charged for some of their activities, e.g. Premier Support and Premier Customer Success; so that wasn’t unique to our Services team.)

  3. Ensure autonomy. We should segment our organization to give each team leader the full autonomy and all the resources required to completely meet a customer’s discrete need. Minimize hand-offs between teams.
  4. Clarify for our customers who to go to for what. Eliminate duplication of activities across functions.
  5. Give more responsibility to high-potential leaders. We’re committed to investing in team members who have made massive contributions while at Gainsight. Many of those team members are in our St. Louis office, and I’m excited to promote a new cohort of leaders there as a part of this reorganization.
  6. Maximize coordination among post-sales teams. Rather than three disparate teams, we want one unified organization with a single strategy.

Customer Needs

The new organizational structure is mapped to three discrete needs that our customers have.

  • Outcomes Management: Translate business objectives into a Success Plan, drive change, and demonstrate ROI for the customer Customer Success Team
  • Fast Time-to-Value: Lead a structured process to achieve a set of initial business objectives Onboarding Success Team
  • Solutions On-Demand: Tackle inbound customer challenges Technical Success Team

Functional Areas

Having identified the three customer needs around which to align the organization, we then identified the key functional areas that were critical to deliver on each need.

org-structure-functional-areas

Note that “Solutions On-Demand” includes not only the resolution of tickets that can be resolved relatively quickly, but also solutions to customer requests for more consultative guidance about how to leverage the product. That’s where our Customer Success Architects will come in. I’ll publish more about that team in the coming months.

“Solutions On-Demand” also can be delivered through Community (where customers can provide solutions to each other’s questions) and Content (which allows customers to get effective help easily and independently).

In addition to these customer-facing teams, we also have an internal-facing organization, the Customer Success Operations team, which helps all three teams work smoothly together. You can read more about our CS Ops function here. Plus, we’re building an Internal Training & Enablement function to make sure all our customer-facing teams develop maximal knowledge of the product as it rapidly evolves.

Next Steps

Since most of our team members aren’t really changing what they’re doing day-to-day, and since we’ll be following a measured transition plan, you shouldn’t see any disruption as a customer. What you should expect from us in the coming months is an even more fully integrated customer experience.

In the next several weeks, I’m looking forward to blogging about the charter for each team, including each team’s mission, primary metrics, skills required for each functional area within the team, finalized titles, job description for each role, and the career path within the team.

Cheers to a new phase for Customer Success at Gainsight!

Feel free to send questions or feedback to Allison at apickens@gainsight.com. Follow her blog posts on Twitter @PickensAllison.

  • March 23, 2016
  • Allison Pickens
  • 4 Comments
  • Best Practices, Gainsight on Gainsight, _Customer Success

The ROI of Customer Success

Allison Pickens is VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at Gainsight.

The number-one question that keeps most VPs of Customer Success up at night is:

“What’s the ROI of Customer Success?”

This question is challenging to answer for two reasons:

(1) Broad Accountability with Limited Influence

CSM teams are typically held accountable for the gross renewal rate, as well as upsell in many cases.

But we all know that when a customer renews, it’s not just because of the CSM, even if s/he deserves most of the credit. The Product Team ensured adequate product-market fit, the Sales Team originally sold to a customer with the right profile and adequate resources and the Support Team followed up on tickets in a timely way.

Other teams also pave the way for the CSM to upsell his/her customers.

In reality, it takes a village to renew and upsell a customer. Customer Success can’t take full credit.

(2) Broad Influence with Limited Accountability:

At the same time, CSMs influence metrics that they’re not typically held accountable for.

A few examples:

MQLs: When an inbound lead says they “heard great things about your product,” there was a CSM behind the existing customer that spoke with the lead. But formal accountability for MQLs lies with Marketing.

Close rate: When a prospect signs a contract after speaking with a reference, there was a CSM behind that reference-able customer. But formal accountability for the close rate lies with Sales.

Ticket resolution time: When your Support team resolves a ticket quickly, they may in fact be indebted to your CSM team for providing helpful context for the ticket. But formal accountability for ticket resolution time lies with Support.

Bugs rate: When the quality of your product improves, there’s often a CSM in the background that offered feedback to your engineering team. But formal accountability for the incidence of bugs lies with Engineering.

Again, the true ROI of Customer Success isn’t limited to metrics that CSMs are typically held accountable for.


Most companies are aware of Problem #1 – that CSM teams don’t have exclusive influence over the metrics they’re accountable for.  That’s why CSM teams typically don’t get full credit for improved renewal rates; we also recognize the Product Team for improving usability, the Services Team for improving the implementation process, etc.  

Interestingly, most companies don’t recognize that Problem #1 is equally applicable to departments besides CSM.

  • Marketing is held fully accountable for MQL target attainment.
  • Sales is held fully accountable for attainment of the new business target.

But as illustrated by the examples listed under Problem #2 above, in reality Marketing and Sales don’t have complete influence over MQLs and new business respectively. Customer Success contributes to both of those metrics.

Non-CSM departments are also subject to Problem #2: they influence metrics that they’re not typically held accountable for. For example, the Sales Team influences time-to-value (and ultimately the gross renewal and upsell rates) by selling to customers who are or are not the right fit. But as long as the Sales Team meets their new business target, “it’s all good.”

A Venn diagram can illustrate Problems #1 and #2.  I’ve shown two examples below: one for CSM and one for Sales.

CSMs are held accountable for the Renewal Rate and Upsell metrics, but can’t completely influence them, which is why those metrics are on the border of the Influence circle. They influence Referrals, References, and Product Quality, but not completely, which is why those metrics are on the border of the Influence circle.

image02

And the Sales Team finds itself in an analogous situation:

image04

So why do these problems matter? In the current situation, we have the following consequences:

  • If you want to improve a particular metric, it’s not clear which department you should invest in, given that multiple departments influence each metric.
  • Relatedly, if you want to quantify the ROI of a given resource (i.e. the prompt of this blog post), you can’t simply look to the metrics that this resource is formally accountable for.
  • If you have a feeling that a given department should do additional work to contribute to a metric that they don’t formally own, it’s hard to get them to change their focus.

In the best organizations, accountability and influence coincide.

image03

So what does that ideal organization look like?

Before jumping to my recommended solution, let’s explore two other organizational models that address Problems #1 and #2.

Organizational Model #1: Carve Out Silos

This solution argues that if Customer Success is to be a peer to Sales and other departments, it has to be fully accountable for its own metric – i.e. take full credit and blame for it, even if the team’s influence is limited.

In this world, every department is accountable for one to two key metrics.  For example:  

  • Sales: New Business ARR
  • Marketing: MQLs
  • Customer Success: Gross Renewal Rate and Upsell ARR
  • Support: Ticket Resolution Time
  • Services/Onboarding: Project Completion Time, Services Gross Margin

This is what most SaaS businesses look like today. In this model, every department head fights for resources to achieve his/her metric. At Gainsight, we call this model the “Team of Rivals.”  

The benefit? Every metric is well-represented in a cross-functional debate.

The downside? There are often significant negative externalities from each department’s actions. For example:

  • Support strives for faster resolution time to the detriment of the customer experience, hurting the gross renewal rate that the CSM team is responsible for.
  • Customer Success strives to improve the renewal rate, but doesn’t make the effort to convert happy customers into advocates, which is a missed opportunity to drive the Marketing Team’s MQL generation.  
  • Marketing strives to boost the volume of MQLs to the detriment of the Sales Team’s average selling price.

In this model, the only person who (a) has an incentive to care about all metrics and (b) is capable of minimizing the negative externalities of each team’s effort is the CEO. The CEO spends his/her time prodding each department head to “keep the other department’s goals in mind,” organizing off-sites to alleviate friction between teams, and slogging through cross-functional initiatives.  

This is one major reason why being CEO of a typical SaaS company is a very difficult job, and also a reason why many CEOs are hiring a Chief of Staff to do the dirty work.

Organizational Model #2: Make Customer Success the Glue

At Gainsight, we know Solution #1 isn’t the best way to run a company. That’s why we’ve written so much about the role of the CSM in serving as the quarterback – on behalf of your customers – to hold other departments accountable for their role in customer success.

This model takes for granted that other departments – Sales, Marketing, etc. – are largely focused on their own one-to-two metrics and operating in their own silos. The CSM’s role is to prevent the resultant inefficiencies from affecting the customer experience.

In this model, the CSM…

  • Ensures that Support Teams are not just driving time to resolution, but also driving toward the right resolution from the customer’s perspective.
  • Gives feedback to the Sales Team when they sell to customers that aren’t ready for the product (see our Readiness Risk).
  • Works with the Services/Onboarding Team to help overcome any negative sentiment during onboarding and ensure value is delivered (see our Implementation and Sentiment Risks).
  • Etc.

The detriments of this model are as follows:

  1. Your CSMs have to be strong – they’ll be expensive.
  2. Your head of CS also has to be strong.
  3. Ideally, non-CSM teams keep customer happiness in mind even when the CSM team isn’t monitoring them. When CSM has to monitor, opportunities to drive customer happiness are inevitably missed.
  4. Pattern recognition will invariably slip through the cracks. Your CSMs might succeed in tactically resolving cross-functional issues that arise, but they won’t be in a good position to identify patterns that require functional expertise. For example, they may not recognize that a product enhancement would fix some of the issues they’re working through precisely because they’re not product experts.

Organizational Model #3: Align Accountability with Influence

image03

Here’s the model I recommend: hold departments accountable for all metrics they influence, and only those.  

Let’s take a look at the CSM department as an example. CSMs drive New Business by generating new leads and by providing sales references and customer case studies that improve close rates. Once you analyze your close rates by lead source and how those change when a sales reference or case study is used, you can calculate the incremental New Business ARR resulting from the CSM team’s advocacy efforts.  

new_business_influence

(This data is purely illustrative, not real)

This means you can assign a New Business target to the CSM team.  

Because this framework assigns a value to CSMs’ influence of a metric that they are not normally held accountable for, the framework allows us to return to the question initially posed in this email: what’s the ROI of Customer Success?

The ROI is equal to the sum of the dollar-metrics that the CSM team influences. Add the Incremental New Business ARR described above to the Incremental ARR due to CSM activities influencing the renewal rate and the CSM activities influencing upsell, as described here:

image01

(This data is purely illustrative, not real)

The hardest part will be determining the multipliers in the chart above. But once your organization is aligned on those, you can calculate the dollar impact of your CSM team using a dashboard.  

Imagine that: Every week, reporting on the dollar impact of your CSM team.

Stay tuned: I’ll write in more detail about calculating the ROI of CSM in the coming weeks. For example, given that a saved renewal preserves a potentially perpetual annuity stream (in the form of future renewals), you could calculate the ROI of CSM efforts in terms of Lifetime Value (LTV) rather than ARR.  More to come.  


So, can you align Accountability and Influence for every department, not just for CSM?

In theory, every department should have a target for each metric it influences. In the table below, I’ve indicated which departments – in principle – should probably have a target (“T”) for each financial metric. (Taking this to the extreme, you could even argue that every cell in the table should contain a “T.”)  

image00

For example, just as you can assign a dollar value to a sales reference from a CSM (in terms of Incremental New Business ARR), you can assign a dollar value to a support ticket closed within 24 hours (in terms of Incremental Renewed ARR).

We haven’t implemented this broad-based target system at Gainsight. But we know that SaaS companies need a better way of aligning Accountability and Influence. I’ll post more on this topic in the future.  


To learn about processes that you can set up for your CSM team and other departments, check the Business Processes section of Gainsight Go, check out the Gainsight Vault, or contact your CSM. You can also send questions or feedback to Allison at apickens@gainsight.com. Follow her blog posts on Twitter at @PickensAllison.

  • February 23, 2016
  • Allison Pickens
  • 2 Comments
  • Best Practices, Customer Success 101, Gainsight Essentials, _Customer Success, _Top Posts

10 Ways We Engage with Execs at Our Customers

Allison Pickens is VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at Gainsight. Thanks to Kelly DeHart (Director of Customer Success) and other team members for contributing to this blog post and creating some of the processes we’ll describe below.

Note to Gainsight Customers: This post contains links to Vault Assets you can import directly into Gainsight.

Do these scenarios sound familiar?

  1. The exec at a customer tells you s/he loves your product, but your CSM says that the junior day-to-day lead hasn’t made any progress with it.
  2. Your CSM thinks the customer is making a ton of progress with your product, but the exec emails you and says they’re not getting value.

Both of these scenarios are troubling. In the first one, it’s only a matter of time before the junior lead tells the exec that it’s not worth renewing your contract. In the second, it doesn’t matter whether the customer is making progress “in reality”, since what really matters is the exec’s view of reality.

It’s critical to create alignment across the people at the customer. After all, “the customer” is really just a collection of people, all of whom have different personalities, opinions, and influences over whether “the customer” becomes successful, renews, and recommends your product.

In this post, I’ll share how we engage with executives, to ensure that our customers stay on track.

METHOD 1: Executive Business Reviews

We schedule Executive Business Reviews at regular intervals. The purpose of an EBR is to:

  • Recap the value that the customer has achieved by using Gainsight
  • Discuss how the customer can achieve even more value

We cover the following topics:

(1) Introductions and Company Updates:

On the first slide, we share the name and title of each participant in the meeting. This includes members of the customer and Gainsight team members. We make sure to invite not only the Exec Sponsor but also the Adoption Champion(s) (our term for the leader of a Customer Success team, often director-level) and the Gainsight Administrator (often an operations leader). The goal is to ensure that key influencers at the customer are in the meeting and are aligned on the takeaways coming out of the meeting.

The next 4 slides recap Gainsight’s progress as a company since the last EBR. The goal is to reassure the customer that they’re working with a best-in-class organization that has the desire and ability to be their long-term partner. Our Product Marketing team provides slides that show:

  • Some of the customers we’ve sold to, and the percentage of large-cap software companies, publicly traded cloud companies, and “unicorn” private cloud companies that are Gainsight customers
  • The growth in our organization; a chart shows number of employees over time
  • Our thought leadership and best-practice resources the customer can access, including our Community, our Blog, and our Webinars
  • Our Pulse conference

(2) Executive Summary

It’s important to highlight the overall takeaways from the presentation upfront. Executives often have short attention spans (certainly, I am guilty of this!), so we aim to get straight to the point, and then dive into the details later in the deck.

Here’s an example of an Exec Summary slide. The 3 components correspond to the 3 sections of the overall deck.

CSM1

(3) Success Plan

We align our Success Plan process with our EBR process. Each Success Plan is intended to cover the period between EBRs. So at each EBR, we review progress made on the past period’s Success Plan, and then gather input to create a Success Plan for the next period.

We export the active customer Success Plan from the Customer360 and include it in our EBR deck to help drive this portion of the discussion. In this section we include (1) Success Plan summary slide which outlines the list of Objectives we’ve been working towards, (2) the more detailed Success Plan objective slides covering each objective in the plan, and (3) a slide to highlight timeline & status of each objective.

After the review of the existing Success Plan, we include a slide on core Customer Success Business Challenges. This slide helps guide discussion with the Exec, ultimately resulting in selection of the next core objectives to work towards. Following the EBR, the CSM will create a new Success Plan that includes the refreshed objectives.

CSM2

CSM3

CSM5

(4) Health & Adoption

It’s critical for us to ensure alignment with the customer on the health of our partnership during the EBR. In the spirit of transparency, we share our view of the customer’s health by revealing our Gainsight Scorecard to them. We review each scorecard measure & highlight our justification for considering them as Red, Yellow, or Green. We also look to get buy-in from the customer regarding whether they agree with our assessment, or have a difference of opinion. This is a great way for us to ensure we’re on the same page, as well as to expose any gaps which need to be addressed.

In this section, we also drill down into the customer’s adoption of Gainsight (essentially a double-click into the ‘Habits’ measure of the scorecard). We include a slide on overall usage trending, which allows us to look at adoption of various parts of the product over time.

Lastly, the CSM will include any additional slides which are necessary in order to provide greater detail into a scorecard measure that is critical to the customer. Examples of this would be a detailed slide on a customer’s core product enhancement asks, or an overview of top priority support tickets.

CSM6

adoption tred & key milestones

(5) Next Steps

Before the EBR, we’ll create a slide to capture next steps that we recommend coming out of the meeting, but we will also edit that slide during the EBR to record feedback from the customer.

After the EBR, we’ll write an email that reminds the team of the next steps and includes a screenshot of the new Success Plan that we agreed to during the meeting.

EBR Frequency:

The frequency of the EBR depends on which Customer Success/Support package the customer purchased:

  • Premier+: 4x per year
  • Premier: 2x per year
  • Standard: 1x per year

(These packages are approximately correlated to the size and lifetime value of the customer. We’ll write more about our Customer Success packages in a later post, but in the meantime you can learn about Customer Success business models here.)

We created Lifecycle Calls to Action (CTAs) to remind us to schedule these EBRs. Here’s the Playbook for the EBR:

EBR

METHOD 2: Sponsor Tracking

One of the top causes of churn for most vendors is a change in executive leadership at the customer, which often results in a change in strategy and/or a change in preference for software vendor. It’s critical to regroup quickly when this happens. You can improve your reaction time by tracking whether each executive sponsor has left the customer.

To this end, we use our Sponsor Tracking functionality in the Customer 360 dashboard.

Sponsor Tracking is an out-of-the-box feature that incorporates data from a variety of professional networks. Users can easily identify sponsors from the Customer 360 page and will be alerted any time the Sponsor changes job title, company or location. This allows you to mitigate risk with that customer, and identify new opportunities in the sponsor’s new department or company

A user can select a Sponsor from their list of Contacts, and Sponsor Tracking will suggest a matched profile.

CSM11

A user can easily see which Sponsors are being tracked from the Customer 360. When a sponsor changes, you can trigger a CTA to be created with an associated Playbook for the CSM.

CSM12

METHOD 3: New Sponsor Process

You’ll also need a process for what to do once a new executive has replaced the prior one. We have a New Sponsor Playbook that guides our CSMs in ensuring a successful transition. We cover 4 topics during a series of meetings:

  1. Introduction to Gainsight & Partnership Overview: We review our partnership to date, assess the exec’s familiarity with Gainsight, and discuss at a high level how the team is using the product. This conversation may lead into a full demo of Gainsight.
  2. How a VP of Customer Success Uses Gainsight: Best-practice discussion about how I use Gainsight to run the team. This session helps us explain how Gainsight is relevant to the exec personally in his/her role, not simply to his/her team members. (You can read more about how I use Gainsight here.)
  3. Strategy Alignment Overview: We want to make sure that the work we’re doing with the exec’s direct reports is aligned with the exec’s strategic objectives. Coming out of this session, we create a new Success Plan for that exec.
  4. Overview of Gainsight Instance: We get the exec up to speed on what his/her team has already configured in Gainsight at a detailed level.

Read more about our New Sponsor Process here.

METHOD 4: Executive Sponsor Program

Our VPs and other senior leaders from across departments at Gainsight are assigned as Executive Sponsors to accounts above a certain ARR threshold. They are assigned CTAs to remind them to check in with the customer execs every so often.

The primary purposes of the Exec Sponsor Program are two-fold:

  1. To uncover latent challenges in our larger accounts
    1. Higher ARR or brand value means that more management attention is needed.
    2. To support effectively our largest accounts, more intimate knowledge of the account is required than CSM team leaders generally have the bandwidth to acquire.
  2. To give Gainsight executives across departments exposure to real customer issues in depth. This awareness helps our VP of Product design better products, helps our VP of Sales design a better sales process, etc.

Read more about our Exec Sponsor Program here.

METHOD 5: Implementation Updates from Onboarding Project Manager

We send regular updates to the exec to keep them apprised of progress during onboarding. Onboarding is a critical time in the lifecycle: If it goes well, the customer is likely to remain a healthy customer; if it goes poorly, it can be costly to get the customer back on track later.

Sometimes onboarding doesn’t go well because the customer hasn’t dedicated the right resources. That one reason why it’s important to stay in close touch with the exec — so that you can work with him/her to assign the right people to the project.

Premier+ Customers

Currently, for customers with custom implementation SOWs, the Project Manager sends weekly updates to the Adoption Champion, copying the Executive Decision Maker (Adoption Champion is our term for the mid-level person at the customer who is most responsible for encouraging adoption of Gainsight at the individual-contributor level; often it’s a team director.) The update includes progress made during the week relative to the project plan that was aligned on at the start of the engagement, implementation steps for the next couple of weeks, key risks to meeting those milestones, and important decisions to be made next week.

We put the Adoption Champion in the “To” line and the Exec in the “CC” line because we want to empower the Adoption Champion to take ownership of the project from the customer’s side.

For customers that select our Express onboarding process, we review their project plan during the weekly status calls with the customer, we share a self-service version of the project plan so that they can monitor their progress, and we are in the process of deploying a new “External Collaborator” functionality to encourage self-service knowledge share / updates.

If any red flags are raised within or in response to the PM updates, the CSM will check in with the Executive directly to understand their sentiment and align on go-forward plan as needed.

Premier Customers

Same as for Premier+.

Standard Customers

For customers that select our Express onboarding process, we review their project plan during the weekly status calls with the customer, we share a self-service version of the project plan so that they can monitor their progress, and we are in the process of deploying a new “External Collaborator” functionality to encourage self-service knowledge share / updates.

If a customer is considered “at-risk” during implementation, the Project Manager sends an email update on progress to the Executive on a monthly basis.

METHOD 6: Regular Updates on Success Plan from CSM

Premier+

Our Success Plans tackle business objectives that span anywhere from a quarter to a year, with clearly defined monthly or quarterly deliverables, based on the planning and execution cycle at the customer’s organizations. In addition, we create turnaround Success Plans for our at-risk customers which are shorter-term and more tactical in nature. We provide live updates on a monthly basis (e.g., on weekly check-in calls with the Adoption Champion or by email) to ensure we are aligned on progress towards our goals.

Premier

Our Success Plans tackle goals over a 6 month period of time, based on the Executive’s vision & objectives. Goals are set at the beginning of the partnership, and reviewed in depth every six months via our EBR process. We also provide Success Plan updates on a quarterly basis to ensure we are aligned on progress towards our goals – these updates are provided via email from the CSM to the Exec and contain an export of the actual Success Plan from Gainsight.

Standard

We currently create Success Plans for at-risk customers. We are planning on automating this process to create Success Plans for all customers during the sales cycle that will then serve as an input into their implementation. We review Success Plan progress during EBRs once per year. Finally, we are exploring sending CoPilot email updates on Success Plan progress to execs very 6 months.

METHOD 7: Updates from CSM during Risk Situation

Premier+

In cases of rare extreme risk, (e.g. systemic failure or workflow stoppage), we provide updates every 4 hours to our execs, or more frequently whenever possible. However, in less extreme cases, the updates are daily, twice a week or weekly depending on the severity of the risk.

Daily updates are provided for the flagged risks:

  • Support Risk: Major support issues resulting in workflow stoppage (Update provided by Support Director)
  • Bug Risk: Majors bugs for which there is no immediate or planned solution (Update provided by Support Director)
  • Launch Risk: project related risks that will shift an imminent go live date (Update provided by Project Manager)

In these cases, the internal risk owner who updates the customer will copy the CSM on all emails. The CSM will escalate internally if the risk management goes off track. Once we believe the risk has been resolved, the CSM coordinates a meeting with the Executive and the internal risk owner, to ensure everyone agrees the issue has been resolved.

Bi-monthly updates are provided for the following flagged risks:

  • Sentiment, Habits, Product, and Company Risks: Update provided by CSM, except in the cases of complex product enhancement requests, in which case the Product team quarterbacks the effort and provides updates.

In the case of those types of risks:

  • CSM will schedule meeting with the Executive to discuss source of concern or issue, and agree on a path forward
  • CSM will identify and document the steps needed to correct, via a Success Plan that is shared with the customer
  • CSM will communicate updates to the customer against the Success Plan twice-monthly (until issue is brought to resolution)

Premier

Same as Premier+.

Standard

The CSMs that work with Standard customers are primarily focused on providing updates on flagged risks relating to Habits, Company, or Sentiment Risk. Given that account ratios are higher in this part of our business, our CSMs spend less time coordinating with other departments on the risk categories that those departments manage (e.g. Implementation Risk or Support Risk).

  • Habits Risk: When customers are in Red or Orange Habits (low adoption), we email execs to inform them of their team’s low usage, understand why, and align on a path toward greater adoption.
  • Company Risk: When customers have a change in a core role, we email execs immediately to understand the plan / timeline for re-hire and to get an introduction to the new contact. If we experience an exec sponsor change, we work with our adoption champion to get an introduction and meeting with the new exec as soon as possible.
  • Sentiment Risk: When customers express poor Sentiment (e.g. through a low NPS rating), we work with execs to identify the root cause and address their concerns.

METHOD 8: Exec Escalation

When a customer issue is so significant that they email me or our CEO, we take it very seriously. We’ve developed a process to handle these situations so that we can reach resolution as fast as possible and ensure no balls are dropped.

  1. Receive concerned email from a customer. I (or our CEO) forwards it to our CSM Team Lead.
  2. CSM Team Lead opens a manual “Executive Escalation” CTA and assigns it to an Escalation Manager based on customer context and technical complexity. This can be either our Director of Support, Director of Services, or CSM Lead.
  3. Escalation Manager takes lead on our Executive Escalation playbook. The tasks for this playbook are:
    1. Define criteria for closure upfront
    2. Define frequency of internal and external updates (hourly/daily/weekly)
    3. Provide internal updates to chatter and external updates to customer
    4. Confirm with customer that escalation is closed
    5. Send gift to customer on behalf of CEO or myself, to remind the customer how much we appreciate their partnership.

METHOD 9: Director Check-in’s

Even though your CSMs are engaging with execs at your customers, it’s important for their managers to do the same. There are 2 reasons:

  1. Your exec sponsor may be more willing to share certain feedback with someone senior than with your CSM. (That said, we seek to create a strong line of communication at the CSM level, to ensure a more scalable way to gather and respond to feedback.)
  2. It’s critical for team leaders to hear from customers firsthand, to boost their awareness of what’s going on in their customer segment.

Premier+

When a customer is new to the Gainsight relationship, the Gainsight team director connects with the executives/directors once every two weeks for 20 minutes to discuss:

  • Pulse check on the implementation/rollout
  • Change management and adoption in your team
  • Sharing best practices from other customers on specific topics
  • Special topics (e.g., events and speaking engagements, dashboards)

After the first 6 months, we move this to a monthly cadence of check-ins.

Particularly in our large accounts with many stakeholders, we take a “peering” approach, in which our directors align with most senior people at the account, and the CSM aligns with the next level down. This helps us improve our coverage.

Premier

The team director sends an email to customer execs quarterly, aimed to solicit feedback on progress, our team, and product. The email is sent via Co-Pilot to 10 customers a week throughout the quarter, giving leverage to the director.

Standard

Same as Premier, but every 6 months, and the email is sent to 25 customers a month.

METHOD 10: VP Check-in’s

I personally aim to engage with 15 executives at our customers every week, whether over email or by phone. I ask my team directors to send me a list of 15 executives to contact. In situations where the CSM has asked me to gather specific feedback or encourage the customer to take some specific action, I’ll create a customized email for each exec. But in most cases, I’ll simply say:

“I just wanted to check in and see how things are going. Let me know if I can remove any roadblocks or trade notes on a topic that’s top of mind for you. I’m happy to hop on a call if helpful.”

Open-ended questions allow the customer to ask for the type of support that’s most helpful to them.

In addition, blog posts like these help me stay in touch with execs in a one-to-many way. Our CEO Nick also plans this year to engage with CEOs at our customers through regular one-to-many email communication and blogs on how he uses Gainsight as a CEO.

BONUS METHOD: Track Executive Usage

We track Executive adoption of Gainsight with an “Executive Engagement” Scorecard. Currently, we have two measures in this Scorecard, one to track Exec Dashboard Usage and the other to track Exec C360 usage. Usage in these features can indicate their using Gainsight to track team metrics, lead meetings, or prep for important customer calls. We also hope to introduce measures to track Exec advocacy and event attendance.

Bonus
___

If you’d like to learn more about how to implement these processes in your organization, check the Business Processes section of Gainsight Go, check out the Gainsight Vault, or contact your CSM. You can also send questions or feedback to Allison at apickens@gainsight.com. Follow her blog posts on Twitter at @PickensAllison.

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Here are ready-to-use versions of what you’ve seen in this post:

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  • February 22, 2016
  • Allison Pickens
  • No Comments
  • Best Practices, _Customer Success, _Top Posts

Top 23 Customer Success “Tips of the Day” from 2015

Last year, I started sending “Tip of the Day” emails to my team. Sometimes I sent a Tip when I noticed a smart tactic that one team member used, and wanted to make sure we replicated it across the team. Other times I noticed a mistake that shouldn’t be repeated. Sometimes I had an idea for a process innovation and wanted the team to start thinking about it. Sometimes I wanted to spread certain norms and values.

In this post I’ve gathered the top tips from last year. Feel free to steal these and send them to your team!

There are a few benefits to sending Tips like these, including:

  1. The entire team knows what’s top of mind for me.
  2. They keep us agile, focused on continuous improvement.
  3. The tip can inspire a new process improvement.
  4. All team members can brainstorm about how to design that process, even if it’s their manager or our Ops lead who formalizes it.
  5. I can inspire action even before we roll out that process improvement in a formal way.
  6. Additional channel beyond meetings for training the team on important skills.

#1: Being a Rock Star

Hi Team,

What does it mean to be a “rock star” on our team?

Rock stars do their job extremely well. But they don’t stop there. They go “above and beyond” by contributing to the strategic direction of our team.

Here are some examples of how you can be a rock star:

  • Identify repetitive activities that our team is doing and propose ways to scale (such as 1:Many communication and the CoPilot Welcome Email below)
  • Propose ways that we can specialize more
  • Own or contribute to a quarterly play
  • Identify trends across your customers and post them to Chatter
  • Do an analysis that shows a pattern across our customers – eg what are the most common feature requests? what are the most common upsell opportunities?
  • Propose analyses that show whether our efforts are paying off in terms of adoption, renewal, upsell
  • Come up with new techniques for driving adoption
  • Put on your VP hat every day – even better, your CEO hat
  • …And the list goes on!

What are some other ideas?

APF1

#2: Career Development

Some of you who are earlier in your careers might be thinking, where should I go with my career?

Several years ago, I interviewed for a role with a CEO. The CEO asked the following question, which I’ll never forget.

Say there’s an international festival that’s similar to the Olympics, except that instead of the competitions centering on athletic events, there’s a competition for every possible skill you could imagine. There’s a competition for juggling, for doing mathematical proofs, for cracking “knock knock” jokes, for being a good friend, for memorizing dates of historical events…the list goes on indefinitely.

Everyone in the world is participating in the festival.

Which competition would you participate in, in order to maximize your chances of winning?

The point is: Think about what you’re really good at, relative to everyone else out there. Think about what makes you shine, what makes you special.

#3: News Alerts

Have you set up news alerts on your customers?

Advantages:

  • Learn about an acquisition, merger, or other major company event right away. We all know that timing is super important for staying on the right track through a critical transition.
  • Obtain pieces of information (e.g. on product launches, strategic position, competitors) that you can refer to in customer conversations and in developing Success Plans. One great way to drive NPS!

#4: Childlike Joy

Every time we design a new process, let’s insert some childlike joy into it!

Example for brainstorming: In new sponsor process, we send a singing telegram to welcome the new exec.

#5: Internal Meetings

Hi Team,

Let’s sharpen up our way of planning and managing internal meetings.

  • In advance send agenda + state concretely the specific objective(s) for the meeting. In other words, what counts as success for the meeting? What do you need to accomplish?
  • Do as much of the work as possible for the group ahead of the meeting. Then the meeting will be focused on gathering reactions to a strawman, rather than starting from scratch on a complex topic, which puts people on the spot and can become disorganized.
    • Note: even brainstorms require structure and significant advanced preparation in order to be effective.
  • Send the work you prepared 24+ hours in advance of meeting
  • Try to invite only the critical people to the meeting; no one likes joining a call where they’re not really needed
  • Recap agenda + objectives at start of call
  • Manage the conversation so that you don’t get off topic
    • If someone strays from the topic or is long-winded, politely redirect the conversation and explain that while you appreciate their input, your intention is to keep the meeting on track.
  • If there is disagreement and it doesn’t look like you’ll get consensus by the end of the call, explain that you appreciate everyone’s input and will be making a decision after the call (assuming you are the decision-maker), or else set up more time if the debate is productive.
  • Recap your conclusions + next steps at end of meeting
  • End 5 minutes early
  • Send a recap of what you decided after the meeting
  • #6: Thoughtful Communication

    What does it mean to “communicate thoughtfully”?

    Think about:

    1. Who is your audience?

      Consider seniority, personality, background, function, internal/external.

    2. How are they probably feeling right now?

      Can you gauge their mood? Given what you know about what they’ve been experiencing, what is probably keeping them up at night right now?

    3. What outcome are you aiming for?

      What are you trying to influence them to do? How do you want them to perceive you?

    4. Given 2 and 3, what tone is appropriate for your audience?

      Cheerfulness? Seriousness? OK to joke?

    5. Given 2 and 3, what information is appropriate to share? What isn’t appropriate to share?

      Some people probably shouldn’t know what you did last weekend. On the other hand, you might bond with others over a weekend activity.

    Communicating thoughtfully is particularly important as you become more senior. The best leaders are extremely skillful at this.

    #7: Speed

    Hi team,

    When a customer isn’t happy, speed is of the essence. Many companies we work with make decisions super quickly.

    Before our team meeting 1 week from today, I’d like for each of us to think through 1 way that we can improve our reaction time + turnaround time in situations such as these:

    • Detractor/Passive NPS
    • Non-responsiveness
    • We learn that sponsor is going to depart (but new sponsor hasn’t joined yet)
    • New sponsor joins

    We will discuss during our team meeting in 1 week.

    Thanks,

    Allison

    #8: Emotional Intelligence

    People with high emotional intelligence tend to do better in their careers. From Forbes: “TalentSmart tested emotional intelligence alongside 33 other important workplace skills, and found that emotional intelligence is the strongest predictor of performance, explaining a full 58% of success in all types of jobs.”

    Here’s a checklist to test your own EQ

    #9: NPS

    In an earlier team meeting, we talked about 2 ways to drive NPS:

    1. Reduce the # of Detractors
    2. Convert more Passives to Promoters

    What are ways that we can get turn High Passives into Promoters? Besides doing our jobs extremely well, I’d like to see us give “The Special Touch” more often.

    What are some examples of “Special Touch”?

    1. Gainsight CSM calls an individual CSM at the customer, just to say hi, check in, see how we can help.
    2. We send Copilot emails that express Childlike Joy.
    3. We join every meeting 5 minutes before the start, so that we’re always on the phone when they join.
    4. We turn on our video during the meeting, so that they can see our enthusiasm.
    5. We send gifts, either spontaneously or at important milestones — Gainsight apparel (customized with their logo too?), cupcakes, etc.
    6. We come up with other ways to create “delightful surprises.”

    What are some other ideas?

    #10: Clear Communication

    When you’re drafting an email, writing that Chatter update, creating a slide, or writing a blog post, you’ll want to communicate your point super clearly.

    Rule of Thumb: Would your grandpa or grandma understand the email — Gainsight product features aside? If they wouldn’t understand it, it’s time to re-write.

    • Use as few words as possible to get your point across.
    • Use as few phrases within a given sentence.
    • Add periods instead of commas.

    #11: Communicating with Execs

    Hi Team,

    It’s important to be thoughtful when communicating with execs internally. Not for hierarchical reasons, but for other more important ones.

    Execs have limited mental bandwidth, since they are involved in many things. They tend to develop impressions quickly. They also need to make decisions quickly.

    Here are some tips for communicating with execs, which also apply to communicating with managers more generally.

    1. Show up to every meeting with an agenda, materials already drafted, and objectives for the meeting.
    2. If you’re dealing with an escalation and need help, create your own proposal in advance of asking for help. That way the exec has a starting point that they can offer feedback on. You will get much higher quality feedback this way.
    3. If you can achieve your objectives for the meeting in 15 mins rather than 30, all the better.
    4. Make updates concise and to the point. Highlight the takeaway for the exec at the top, then include details later.
    5. Update your manager on your accomplishments. If you only contact them when you need help, they will develop a skewed understanding of your capabilities. That’s not good for them or for you.

    Have a great weekend all!

    #12: Feedback

    You might have seen Nick post this article a little while ago on “radical candor.” It makes the point that offering candid feedback can actually be a form of generosity.

    I’m a big fan of candor and believe that investing in our team means providing the feedback that everyone needs in order to grow. At one of my prior jobs, we used the slogan “feedback is a gift.” Think:

  • What might be holding you back from giving the feedback that those around you (or reporting to you) need to succeed?
  • What might be holding you back from getting the feedback you need to succeed?
  • #13: Response Time

    My dad, who is not exactly tech savvy :), is a doctor and bought an app for internal messaging in his practice. He wasn’t happy with the product and indicated as much on a survey. Within 20 minutes, he received an email from concerned people on their customer happiness team. They fixed the problem and now he’s a promoter.

    Response time really matters. What if we responded right away when a customer submitted an NPS rating? What if we followed up on customer meetings not just same-day but right after the meeting? This is the kind of effort that shows we care.

    Let’s think about Rapid Response as a strategy.

    #14: Agendas

    Hi Team,

    We should have an agenda for every single customer meeting. If you have recurring meetings scheduled with a customer, and you don’t have a set of objectives for your next meeting, then this meeting is most likely not worth the customer’s time.

    Thanks!

    #15: Automating Your Job

    Hi Team,

    The CEO of eShares wrote a compelling post about the culture at his company. This statement in particular was powerful:

    “Nobody at eShares does the same thing everyday. Everyone is working to put themselves out of a job. This is our “creative destruction” that drives us to evolve, grow, and adapt.”

    Figure out how to automate your job, and you will always have a role at Gainsight. And, you will always be working on something exciting and innovative.

    #16: Congratulating Customers

    Whenever a customer gets into Green or Lime, we need to let them know! I’d suggest the following playbook:

    1. Get on the phone with the customer and make sure you understand their perspective on what got them to that level of adoption — let’s learn as much as we can
    2. Assuming that you believe they’re at a sustainable level of adoption, congratulate them!
    3. To celebrate, send them a gift — cupcakes, a bag with Gainsight apparel, etc.

    I welcome ideas on what else we could be doing.

    #17: Meeting Preparation

    Hi Team,

    Whenever I join a call with one of your customers, make sure you do the following:

    1. Align on the agenda with the customer in advance. I never want to be blindsided by a customer not agreeing with the agenda — and more importantly, they don’t want that, either.
    2. Set up a quick call with me (~15 mins depending on complexity) 24+ hours before the meeting (again, time frame depends on complexity) so that we can align on agenda, content, and desired outcome for the meeting

    Thanks everyone,

    Allison

    #18: Contact Maintenance

    I am visiting too many C360 profiles where not all contacts are listed (exec, adoption champion, admin). This makes it difficult for me to reach out to execs and know whom we’re working with. Don’t let it be your customer the next time this happens!

    #19: Predictable Adoption

    Every time a customer goes into Green or Lime Habits [our measure for sticky adoption], we should be able to tell a narrative about why that happened. This is the only way to refine our approach to adoption so that results become predictable.

    Think:

    • What actions did you take? Did you do a strategy session, align with them on a success plan, see that they attended a webinar, forwarded a blog post, got their exec involved, or take some other action?
    • What factors contributed on the customer’s side?

    I want to see each of you be able to tell a thoughtful success story like this by end of quarter.

    A margarita for every successful story!

    #20: Content & Documentation

    I’m at a CSM conference this afternoon. One speaker said:

    “Every time our SMB team gets on the phone with customers, we consider it a failure of our documentation.”

    Let’s continue to build content to cover all those gaps. If you notice a gap, point it out!

    #21: Organizational Charts

    For each of your customers, are you able to picture their org chart, from CEO, to exec, to individual contributor?

    Knowing this will help you figure out how to help the customer drive and manage change.

    Every Strategy Session for new customers should include a quick discussion on the org chart.

    #22: Aligning on Next Steps

    Hi Team,

    You’ve probably noticed that when we gain buy-in from the customer on action items over the course of a meeting, they’re much more likely to take those next steps.

    I’ve noticed that in some meetings, we go over a ton of content and don’t get buy-in on action items during the call, and instead email the customer afterwards with a list of action items.

    Let’s pursue the first approach.

    Thanks team!

    #23: Continuous Improvement

    Have you been at Gainsight for 1 week?

    If so, that makes you a veteran!

    Heck, even if it’s your first day, you’re probably observing a ton of things that we could do better as a team. In fact, sharing your fresh perspective is extremely conducive to our goal of continuous improvement.

    I would love to see new team members participate more in our team conversations. Your impressions and suggestions are super valuable.

    • January 23, 2016
    • Allison Pickens
    • 4 Comments
    • Best Practices, _Customer Success

    Creating a Job Description: Director of Customer Success

    Now that we’re in the season of New Year’s Resolutions, you might be pondering a few questions:

    • “Am I doing my job well?”
    • “How do I compare to others in the industry?”
    • “Am I spending my time in the right way?”

    These are questions that even the best of us wonder about from time to time. You might have achieved your targets in 2015, but are there things you could be doing better this coming year?

    At Gainsight, we’ve started to create detailed job descriptions for roles that are already filled within our company. This helps to align expectations on the requirements for the role between the person in that role and their manager.

    Even if you created a job description when recruiting, most likely it’s not detailed enough for a team member to refer to day-to-day to gauge whether they’re fulfilling all of their responsibilities.

    Creating a list of responsibilities is especially critical in Customer Success, since as we all know, this team can be pulled into many different activities. You’ll want to specify which ones are valuable.

    Here’s the job description that I created for the Director of one of our high-touch teams.

    Director of Customer Success

    Responsibilities

    • Define and optimize customer journey
      • Define the vision of a Red Carpet experience
      • Standardize the template for a Success Plan for customers in your segment
      • Define and oversee lifecycle processes/touch points, including exec sponsor program, EBR process, “listening” points (e.g. on usage, NPS), and others
      • Create standard presentation materials for lifecycle plays
      • Personally manage escalations from your direct reports, and follow a methodical escalation process to execs
      • Identify opportunities for continuous improvement
    • Drive true value for customers
      • Be an expert on best practices in change management
      • Promote the Challenger approach amongst your team members
      • Find ways for CSMs to deeply understand our customers’ objectives and become a trusted right-hand advisor
      • Determine how to define, drive, and demonstrate the value (ROI) delivered
    • Lead cross-functionally to drive customer success
      • Clarify ownership for each part of the journey
      • Gather feedback from other departments, including Renewals & Expansion, Sales, Services, Support, Product, and others, to
      • improve the customer experience
      • Advocate for changes in other departments’ ways of working (including our onboarding process) and collaborate with them to implement those
      • Drive company-wide definition of ideal customer
      • Create company-wide customer feedback loop
      • Help foster company-wide culture of Customer Success
    • Drive alignment with Renewals & Expansion and Sales
      • Align with R&E on renewal and up-sell strategy and focus on selling with a retention focus
      • Give feedback to Sales and Marketing on prospecting approach
      • Ensure smart hand-off
      • Define CSM involvement during sales cycle
    • Be the best user of Gainsight in the world
      • Promote adoption of key processes in Gainsight, including Success Plan process, Habits process, License Deployment process, Risk process
      • Ensure Gainsight is our company’s single source of truth for customer health
      • Create dashboards to measure customer success
      • Develop ideas for how high-touch teams can use Gainsight, and share during our monthly Product-CSM syncs
    • Own key metrics for your team
      • Gross dollar renewal rate
      • Up-sell dollars
      • Habits / product adoption metrics
      • Deployment
      • NPS
      • Cost / ARR ratio
      • Sales of Premier Support & Success
      • Employee NPS / team member satisfaction
      • Own the financial model for your team, including projections of costs and new hires, and forecasts of renewal and upsell rates
    • Support core metrics for our company and our CSM team as a whole
      • Same metrics above
      • New ARR
    • Recruit, mentor, groom and inspire a world-class team
      • Build a pipeline of great candidates
      • Establish a rigorous interview process
      • Set expectations on performance and give feedback
      • Manage out underperformers
      • Set up training and mentoring to grow team
      • Create culture of massive customer delight
      • Communicate and incent to drive performance (in line with incentive structure for the rest of the CSM team)
    • Propose improvements to your team’s organizational structure
      • Define segmentation of your customer portfolio as appropriate
      • Define different levels within the team
      • Be informed of market compensation
    • Achieve operational excellence
      • Continuously communicate metrics to team
      • Report on metrics each week to Allison

    ___

    You can send questions or feedback to Allison at apickens@gainsight.com. Follow her blog posts on Twitter at @PickensAllison.

    To learn about additional processes you can set up for your CSM team and other departments, visit our Business Processes page on our Support website.

    • January 5, 2016
    • Allison Pickens
    • 6 Comments
    • Best Practices, _Customer Success

    10 Charts for Your Board Meeting

    Allison Pickens is VP of Customer Success and Business Operations at Gainsight

    Note to Gainsight Customers: This post contains links to Vault Assets you can import directly into Gainsight.

    If you’re living in Excel and PowerPoint, then preparing for board meetings takes time. That’s time that you’d probably prefer to spend on actually driving toward the results that the board wants to see.

    We’ve created a way to automate the creation of Customer Success board decks. Thanks to some amazing charts created by our Gainsight Admin, Will, the only preparation I do for the board meeting is think about how to (1) voice-over the major takeaways to our board members and (2) answer questions that they’re likely to have.

    Preface:

    • As is true for all of our blog posts, all data in this post is fake and not indicative of Gainsight’s actual performance.
    • Some reports here require the purchase of our Lifetime Revenue Management add-on. In some cases, additional configuration is needed even after LRM is implemented.
    • Some of these charts require custom fields in Salesforce and advanced rules in Rules Engine. Check out Gainsight Go for guidance on how to build some of these reports.

    Historical Top-Line Financials

    1. Gross and Net Renewal Rate

    2. First, show your historical results. The following chart shows our cumulative gross renewal rate over the course of the quarter, relative to our target, the flat line.

      Gross Renewal Rate = 1 – (Churned Dollars + Downsell) / (ARR eligible for renewal in that quarter)

      The rate we’re showing below is cumulative — i.e. it shows renewals as they are closed — since over the course of the quarter, we wanted to track our progress relative to our target. The chart also shows our net renewal rate.

      Net Renewal Rate = Gross Renewal Rate + (Upsell Dollars) / (ARR eligible for renewal in that quarter)

      Gainsight-Salesforce-Enterprise-Edition

      (Data above is illustrative)

      I should be prepared to answer the following likely questions from board members when presenting this slide:

      • “That’s great that you achieved your target, but what’s your strategy for exceeding your current gross renewal rate?”
      • “I have one portfolio company that’s achieved an X% net renewal rate. How are you going to do that?”
      • “Your overall target might be X, but how are you splitting that target across different customer tiers?”
    3. Churn Story

    4. As much as we aspire to be the best in Customer Success, we’ll admit to having a churned customer now and then. We’ll want to explain why they churned using their historical scorecard. Our scorecard measures track 8 risk categories and thus show in what way the customer was at risk along the way.

      360-View-Salesforce

      (Data above is illustrative)

      I’ll probably get these questions:

      • “To what degree was this churn a surprise?” (The answer should be “Not at all,” if we’re using our scorecard measures properly.)
      • “How many other customers are in the same situation and thus are at risk of churn?”
      • “What are you or other departments doing to prevent churn like this from happening in the future?”
    5. Upsell, by Customer Tier

    6. Next, I’ll show where our upsell is coming from. The following chart shows the distribution of upsell across our 3 customer tiers. It also shows to what degree upsell is being driven by our Renewals and Expansion team and by our Sales team (which drives upsell in Strategic accounts). Learn more about how we’ve divided ownership of upsell here.

      Gainsight-Salesforce-Enterprise-2

      (Data above is illustrative)

      This chart shows the size of upsell in the 3 different tiers. Our Strategic customers are likely to show larger expansion; our SMB customers are likely to have a long tail of small upsells.

      Gainsight-Salesforce-Enterprise-3

      (Data above is illustrative)

      Questions may include:

      • “What are the use cases for these upsells?”
        • Examples could include sales of more licenses into the core team (driven by organic growth of that team), expansion into a new division or region, sales of licenses into other departments (driven by cross-functional collaboration), sales of Premier Support/Success, add-on’s, etc.We’re actually working on creating charts in Gainsight that show this level of detail. It’s also a good idea to prepare a few anecdotes about recent upsells.
      • “To what degree has each Renewals & Expansion manager met his/her upsell quota?”
        • We’ll also work on a chart showing this as our R&E team grows.

      Future Top-Line Financials

    7. Renewals Eligible This Quarter

    8. Looking to the future, I’ll show the ARR for upcoming renewals…

      Gainsight-Salesforce-Enterprise-4

      (Data above is illustrative)

      …and also the scorecard measures for each of those companies, to show any risk in those renewals.

      Gainsight-Salesforce-Enterprise-5

      (Data above is illustrative)

      I’ll prepare to answer these questions:

      • “What is your Gross Renewal Rate forecast?” I’ll give a conservative estimate that I’m “committing to” as well as a stretch goal showing “what’s possible”.
      • “For those customers that are less likely to renew, what is the reason?”

      The scorecard chart described above is useful for answering this question, since if any of the 8 scorecard measures is red, the renewal may be at risk.

    9. Upsell Pipeline

    10. I’ll provide an upsell forecast based on our current pipeline. As you get more sophisticated, you’ll want your Renewals & Expansion Manager to assign a probability to each upsell so that you can take a weighted average of the pipeline to arrive at closed sales.

      Gainsight-Salesforce-Enterprise-6

      (Data above is illustrative)

      Likely questions:

      • “Are the use cases for your forecasted upsell the same as those driving historical upsell?”

      Cost Metrics

    11. ARR and Accounts per CSM

    12. I’ll show ARR per CSM…

      Gainsight-Salesforce-Enterprise-7

      (Data above is illustrative)

      …and number of accounts per CSM, which, of course, is one of the drivers of ARR per CSM.

      Gainsight-Salesforce-Enterprise-8

      (Data above is illustrative)

      Likely questions:

      • “Is ARR per CSM improving?”
      • “What’s your fully loaded cost of CSM per dollar of ARR managed?” This should be less than 15 cents per dollar, as I described in my prior post on building your CSM financial model.
      • “What’s your plan for meeting the 15-cents-per-dollar target?” Your plan will likely involve a combination of increasing accounts per CSM, driving ARR per account (e.g. through upsell), or reducing cost per CSM (e.g. by hiring in less expensive locations or hiring more junior team members).Your plan is likely to vary by customer tier, as described in more detail in my prior post on segmentation.

      Trends in Operating Metrics

    13. Habits Scorecard

    14. So you’ve hit your gross renewal target. But what’s driving your success? You’ll want to show how you’re improving your Habits Scorecard Measure, which measures to what degree your customers are deriving value from your product. As explained in prior posts on our Habits Targets and our Success Plan Process, our CSM team aspires to foster a form of adoption that we believe signals that the customer is getting value.

      The chart below shows our customers distributed across 4 different levels of Habits, each week of the quarter. We want to show that customers are moving into the green and blue sections.

      Gainsight-Salesforce-Enterprise-9

      (Data above is illustrative)

      The following chart shows how Habits are improving at the user-level (vs. the customer-level, above), by illustrating the growth in Healthy-Level Users (daily active users of our Cockpit functionality) and Daily Active Users over time.

      Gainsight-Salesforce-Enterprise-10

      (Data above is illustrative)

      Likely questions:

      • “How did you arrive at the definitions of each of the 4 levels of Habits?”
      • “What is your process for moving customers into the top levels?” We follow our Success Plan Process and have also come up with a long list of “Habits Techniques” that help customers adopt the product more fully. (You can incorporate such techniques into a Playbook in Gainsight.)
      • “What caused each of the ups and downs in the chart on daily active users?”
    15. Top Drivers

    16. You’ll want to show a few charts showing what’s driving your Habits scores.

      Those include:

      • Top Customers, by Page Views and Unique Users:
      • Gainsight-Salesforce-Enterprise-11

        (Data above is illustrative)

      • Top Features:

      Gainsight-Salesforce-Enterprise-12

      (Data above is illustrative)

      Be prepared to answer questions such as:

      • “What are you doing to make sure your top customers stay happy?”
      • “What are you doing to drive adoption of Feature X?”
    17. NPS

    18. Show your NPS score over time. For example, this chart shows the trend in average NPS score (green), grouped by the original contract date.

      image__9_

      (Data above is illustrative)

      Likely questions:

      • “What’s your NPS goal, and why?”
      • “What are the most common reasons for a Promoter rating? Detractor rating?”
      • “Would it be easier to increase your NPS by converting Passives into Promoters, or by reducing the number of Detractors?”
    19. Risks

    I talk about the most common risks in our customer relationships in order to (1) highlight potential causes of future churn and (2) illustrate what we need to do to make our customer relationships healthier.

    The following chart shows the distribution of Flagged Risk CTAs across categories over time. If the chart below showed real data, then I might conclude that we should hire more people on our Support team to improve time-to-resolution, and that we need to amplify our efforts to align with executives at our customers (given the frequency of Company Risk).

    Gainsight___Salesforce_-_Enterprise_Edition (12)

    (Data above is illustrative)

    Questions are likely to include “Why is risk X so frequent?” and “What are you doing to tackle it?”

    ___

    If you’d like to learn more about how to prepare for your upcoming board meeting using Gainsight, contact your Gainsight CSM. To learn about additional processes you can set up for your CSM team and other departments, visit our Business Processes page on our Support website.

    You can also send questions or feedback to Allison at apickens@gainsight.com. Follow her blog posts on Twitter at @PickensAllison.

    Vault Assets mentioned in this post

    (for Gainsight customers only)

    Here are ready-to-use versions of what you’ve seen in this post:

    • Distribution of Upsells by Account Report
    • Renewable ARR by Account (Current Quarter) Report
    • ARR by CSM by Team Report
    • Accounts by CSM by Team Report
    • Upsell by CSM Team Report
    • Potential Upsell ARR by Owner Report
    • Flagged Risk CTAs Opened by Month Report
    • December 16, 2015
    • Allison Pickens
    • No Comments
    • Best Practices, Gainsight Essentials, _Customer Success

    How to Make Your Customers the Center of Your Company

    Note to Gainsight Customers: This post contains links to Vault Assets you can import directly into Gainsight.

    During our Pulse Europe conference, I moderated a dinner discussion among a group of 30 Gainsight customers. I kicked off the discussion with one question: “How would you define Customer Success?”

    One participant immediately responded, “That’s easy. Customer Success is at the center of the universe.”

    She wasn’t kidding. Her response reminded me of a brainstorm during our CCO Summit earlier this year, which inspired a conversation about best practices for cross-functional success. My break-out group did a skit acting out our vision of customer success: where the customer (supported by the CSM) is the sun at the center of the solar system, with other functions such as Sales, Services, Product, Support, and others revolving around him/her.

    It might be a pipe dream to imagine the customer success team as the center of a company. That said, smart companies are indeed orienting themselves around the customer. They understand that their current customers have the capacity to make every other department successful – for example, the Marketing team, by generating references and advocacy; the Sales team, by offering expansion opportunities; and the Product and Engineering teams, by offering feedback on the value and quality of the product. Smart companies also understand that every department should play a role in contributing to customers’ success.

    In this blog post, I’ll share how my own customer success team holds other departments accountable for their role in helping customers. In a future blog post, I’ll discuss “what’s in it for other departments” – why those departments should orient themselves around the customer.

    Sales

    1) Set the right expectations in pre-sales

    Naturally, we want to make sure our account executives set the right expectations with our customers during the sales cycle. Our sales team is top-notch, but sometimes there are miscommunications with the customer. In these situations, we want to share feedback with the account executive to help them improve, and also ask for their help in preparing the customer for onboarding. The CSM will open a Readiness RiskCall to Action (CTA), describe the situation, and notify the Account Executive. We also have a chart that shows the volume of Readiness Risk CTAs over time, so that we can tell whether there’s a broader problem.

    RACH11

     

     2) Ensure a solid hand-off

    When a new customer joins the Gainsight family, we want the transition to the post-sale organization to be as smooth as possible. Our process has two key components to ensure that the transition involves minimal disruption to our customers: using the SFDC opportunity page, and triggering the appropriate lifecycle CTAs.

    The SFDC opportunity page includes a section where AEs answer a series of required questions regarding the customer; AEs literally can’t mark the deal as “Closed” unless they answer the questions. This information sets up the CSM for success with preliminary context to begin building the customer relationship.

     

    Services&CSM

    In addition to the Services & CSM information, we have New Customer Kick-Off CTAs that are triggered automatically when the customer joins. This CTA includes a few key tasks for the CSM, including verifying customer contact information is updated and conducting a live hand-off call with the AE and Services team.

     

    RACH1

     

     

     Support

     1) Highlight high-priority customers with support tickets

    We use automated CTAs to ensure that our Support team focuses on certain high-priority Support situations. We trigger a Risk CTA to the CSM when there is high volume, duration, or priority of support tickets. The CSM can flag the CTA in order to indicate that this issue requires more attention from Support. We then review those flagged CTAs during weekly Support Risk meetings with our director of Support.

    We also have a Scorecard measure that turns red when a CTA opens and is flagged by the CSM; as VP, I tend to look at scorecard dashboards rather than Cockpit, but it’s reassuring to know that the scorecard reflects the risk CTAs that the CSM is focused on.

     2) Give Support visibility into the customer’s context

    Our Zendesk and Service Cloud widgets help our Support team understand the customer’s general context when resolving a ticket. The Support rep can view customer health, usage, and other key metrics to ensure they are supporting the customer properly. This helps to ensure a high-quality customer experience when working with Support.

    unnamed-2

     Services

     1) Reduce implementation time

    We track project milestones in Clarizen and pull those into Gainsight. If a customer does not achieve those milestones by the pre-determined date, then a Risk CTA is triggered to alert the Services project manager and the CSM. We then review those Implementation Risk CTAs during weekly calls with the Services team, to brainstorm ways to get the customer back on track. We never want a customer to slip through the cracks.

     

    ClarizenRACh

    2) Drive value during onboarding

    We want to make sure that the Services team has the full context of the customer when advising them during onboarding or other Services engagements. Our Services team looks at the C360 dashboard to view customer health and open CTAs; we also communicate about customer issues during onboarding using Chatter.

    Sara Vaughn

     

     

    Product

    1) Collaborate on important requests for product enhancements

    Our CSMs create manual Product Risk CTAs when a customer asks for a product enhancement, and we flag the CTA when the enhancement is critical for the customer to derive value from the product. We then ask the Product team for an answer about when the enhancement will be incorporated into the product roadmap, so that we can speedily respond to the customer’s request. Using CTAs, we can track outstanding requests, ensure follow-up from the Product team, and get visibility into the roadmap.

     2) Give visibility into which features aren’t being adopted

    We’ve created a report where we aggregate for the last 30 and 90 days the 10 most viewed pages, which translates into the 10 most viewed features. Similarly, you can create a report and aggregate the least used features that can provide visibility into which features are not being adopted. This data can help us get buy-in from the Product team to make improvements to certain features.

     

    Useage reports

     

     

    Marketing

    Figure out which customers would be the best advocates

    Our Marketing team is always looking to our customers to serve as references or advocates. We want to make sure they ask the right customers for help; it can get a little awkward if they reach out to a customer who’s in the middle of onboarding or cleaning their customer data. By looking at our scorecards, Marketing can quickly identify the healthiest customers.

    Scorecard Cummary

     

     

    We also trigger a CTA and assign it to our Director of Marketing to notify her of a new NPS promoter, or if a customer gave a positive review.

     Engineering

    Collaborate on resolving bugs

    When our Support team identifies a ticket as a verified bug, they mark that as a bug in JIRA and escalate to Engineering. When a customer has experienced a severe bug or a high volume of bugs, a Bug Risk CTA triggers in Gainsight. The support rep will flag the CTA if it is posing a risk to the customer’s use of Gainsight. This allows the CSM to be informed of the progress made against resolution of the bug and decreases cross-functional communication time.

    Company Leadership Team

     1) Review risks in top accounts, by department, during each leadership team meeting

    We have a leadership team meeting once a week, in which we review top accounts with open Risk CTAs. We discuss the cause of each risk and next steps for addressing it. This provides a forum for us to hold each department accountable for resolving the risks in their domain

     2 ) Review recent NPS scores to align on learnings across departments

    Our CSM leadership uses a State of the Union dashboard where we track NPS responses week to week. We review the respondents’ comments in our leadership team meeting and discuss how to act on the feedback in a cross-functional way.

    Sentiment Risk

     

    If you’d like to learn more about how to orient your company around your customers, contact your CSM. You can also send questions or feedback to Allison at apickens@gainsight.com. Follow her blog posts on Twitter at @PickensAllison.

    Vault Assets mentioned in this post

    (for Gainsight customers only)

    Here are ready-to-use versions of what you’ve seen in this post:

    • Recent NPS responses (Last 90 days) Report
    • December 3, 2015
    • Allison Pickens
    • No Comments
    • Best Practices, _Customer Success

    How Other Departments Benefit from Working with Customer Success

    Allison Pickens is VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at Gainsight

    Last week, I talked about how other departments can work more closely with Customer Success, to the benefit of the customer. Today, I’ll discuss how those departments themselves benefit from working more closely with the CS team. In other words – what’s in it for them?

    Here’s how other departments at Gainsight benefit from working with my team.

    WhiteSpace2-1

    Marketing

    1) Proactively identify advocates

    Our Marketing team looks at data in Gainsight on NPS, usage, and other metrics to find the right customer contact for a variety of advocacy opportunities – including joining our customer advisory board, serving as a reference for a prospect, speaking at an event, and speaking with the press. Our Scorecard Dashboard is especially helpful for this.

    CSMWHITE2-2

    One of our major initiatives this quarter is to make it even easier for Marketing to identify advocates. We’re exploring creating a Scorecard Measure for Executive Engagement. Stay tuned!

    2) Reactively identify advocates

    Our Marketing team also wants to be notified when a customer reaches a milestone that indicates they would be a strong advocate, so that Marketing can invite them to do an online review or contribute to our Community. Marketing use CTAs that trigger when a customer responds to our NPS survey with a promoter rating. (You can also set up CTAs to trigger when usage reaches a certain threshold, or when a customer completes onboarding with a high CSAT rating.)

    3) Capture the narrative about how we drove ROI for a customer

    Marketing wants to be able to tell a customer’s “ROI story” in a case study. Because our CSM team nowcreates Success Plans for customers in Gainsight, we will soon have a repository of stories that Marketing can easily refer to. Success Plans help reduce the work involved in producing case studies.

    Sales

    1) Get visibility

    For people in customer-facing roles, there are few worse feelings than calling a customer and being blindsided by an issue that’s troubling him/her. Our account executives look up the current status of customers – including health scores, adoption trends, onboarding status, and other data – in the Sales Widget on the account page in Salesforce.com.

    CSMWhiteSpace2-3

    2) Learn about new opportunities

    When our executive sponsor at a given customer leaves the company, it’s a risk to the customer relationship. On the bright side, the new company that the sponsor joins is now a prospective customer. Our Sales team affectionately calls these departed sponsors our “alumni network.” Our account executives can find out about those new prospects through our Sponsor Tracking feature. You can even automatically create Salesforce opportunities when a sponsor leaves a customer.

    CSMWhitespace2-43) Learn where to focus prospecting efforts

    Gainsight is our source of truth for which customer segments are the most successful with our product. This information helps our Sales Development team know where to prospect. For example, we use reports showing health scores by size of company.

    4) Manage at-risk renewals

    Our Sales team can rest assured that the CS team is managing at-risk accounts by observing the completion of Risk CTAs in the Sales Widget.

    CSMWhitespace2-5

    In situations where the sales team manages the renewal, they can use Gainsight Renewal CTAs to remind themselves to get started on the renewal well in advance, and use dashboards for forecasting.

    I recently published another blog post about how we manage our renewals.

    5) More upsell opportunities

    Sales teams want to be alerted to upsell opportunities, rather than have to crunch the data to figure out how to focus their time. Many of our customers trigger CTAs based on high adoption or NPS rating that alert CSMs to potential upsell opportunities, so that they can involve the sales manager. Now that expansion has become a bigger focus for us, we’re implementing our own upsell CTAs this quarter. We’re planning to configure CTAs that trigger when customers are approaching their maximum number of licenses. We’ll blog more about that later!

    Finance

    1) Drive collections

    Some of our customers trigger CTAs automatically when customers are overdue in paying their bills. The CSM then follows up with the customer to remind them. This can be especially helpful when the Accounts Receivable team isn’t getting a response from the customer.

    When a bill is overdue, our Finance team looks at Customer360 to see whether the non-payment could be due to a customer health issue, in which case they might choose to delay collection. Conversely, Finance can tell when a customer is truly deriving value, which facilitates the collection effort.

    2) See where CSMs are spending their time

    A perpetual topic of debate is whether to classify Customer Success as COGS or Sales & Marketing, and what mix is appropriate. By looking at CTAs closed, Finance teams can get a sense for the fraction of time spent by CSMs on different types of activities that may be classified differently under GAAP.

    Services

    1) Identify opportunities for training

    Services teams can trigger automated CTAs based on the number of support tickets that a customer submits. If they exceed a specific threshold (e.g., more than five tickets filed in two weeks), you can automatically trigger a CTA that will alert someone on the Services team to an opportunity to offer Admin training or workshops.

    2) Identify opportunities for managed services

    Sometimes our customers buy Gainsight without having a designated administrator. In these situations, we can offer them managed services. We flag customers that aren’t quite ready for onboarding using a Readiness Risk CTA, which signals to the Services team that they should explore whether managed services would be appropriate for that customer.

    CSMWhtespace2-6

    3) Identify opportunities for SOWs

    When a customer wants to expand their Gainsight implementation, we create a Success Plan with them, which paints a vision for how the customer can derive value from Gainsight. In some cases, this roadmapping process can inspire the customer to scope out a project with our Services team to achieve the objectives described in the Success Plan, in which case the CSM will open a manual CTA to request an SOW. The Success Plan also makes the scoping process easier.

    CSMWhitespace2-7

    4) Drive time-to-value

    Our Services team uses Gainsight to get the Customer Success Manager’s help during implementation. Our CSMs sometimes assist the Onboarding Project Manager by doing an objective check-in with the customer to gather feedback or to get the project back on track. We manage this coordination using ourImplementation Risk process described here.

    Support

    1) Avoid being blindsided

    Our Support team uses our Zendesk widgets to learn about the customer’s context and any particularities in the customer’s instance of the product. The Support rep can view customer health, usage, and other key metrics to ensure they are supporting the customer properly.

    CSMWhitespace2-8

    Some of our customers instead use our Service Cloud widget.

    2) Prioritize tickets

    Our Support team gets input from our CSM team on which tickets to focus on, by reviewing Support Risk CTAs that the CSM has flagged.

    CSMWhitespace2-9

    Product

    1) Prioritize customers’ requests for enhancements

    Our Product team’s continuous challenge is to prioritize customers’ requests for enhancements. We help them do this by creating Product Risk CTAs whenever a customer makes a significant request, and we flag the CTA when the enhancement is necessary for the customer to derive value from the product. The Product team can filter Cockpit for Product Risk CTAs to get a centralized view of major customer needs.

    CSMWhiteSpace2-10

    2) Set up focus groups

    Our Product team can research which customers they should invite to a focus group by looking at top users of a feature. For example, if they want to improve our survey functionality, they can look at a table of the top survey users.

    3) Announce product releases

    Our Product team sends announcements of new product releases to customers through Copilot, which is the email automation functionality within Gainsight.

    CSMWhitespace2-11

    Executives

    1) Not get blindsided in a customer meeting

    I personally use Gainsight mobile frequently when en route to onsite customer meetings. I’ll pull up the C360 dashboard on my phone to see the latest health score and other customer data.

    CSMWhitespace2-12

    2) Create an Executive Sponsor program

    Executives can stay engaged with customers using an exec sponsor program, which I previously described here. CTAs help remind execs to reach out to our top customers at certain intervals, so that we can get a continuous pulse on our largest accounts.


    If you’d like to learn more about how other departments can benefit from working with your Customer Success team, contact your CSM. To learn about processes you can set up for your CSM team and other departments, visit our Business Processes page on our Support website.

    You can also send questions or feedback to Allison at apickens@gainsight.com. Follow her blog posts on Twitter at @PickensAllison.

    • December 3, 2015
    • Allison Pickens
    • No Comments
    • Best Practices, _Customer Success

    Renewals & Expansions: A Primer

    Note to Gainsight Customers: This post contains links to Vault Assets you can import directly into Gainsight.

    How to manage renewals and expansion is one of the most hotly debated topics in the Customer Success industry. Here’s how we do it at Gainsight.

    Reporting Structure

    The CSM team has always owned renewals and upsell; we’ve always had a net retention goal. Sometimes customers contacted their Account Executive from the original purchase (a member of the Sales team) to request additional licenses, but the vast majority of upsell was driven by the CSM, who was most familiar with the customers’ needs after the sale.

    As a result, when we hired our first Renewals & Expansion (R&E) manager over the summer, we simply achieved greater specialization within the Customer Success team. He reports into Customer Success.

    Why Build a Renewals & Expansion Team

    We found that once we reached a certain size, it didn’t make sense for CSMs to own renewals and upsell because of:

    1. Skill Set: Selling requires a different skill set from the primary responsibility of CSMs: advising the customer about their strategy for deriving value from the product.
    2. Advisor Role: CSMs sometimes feel that having to discuss pricing with customers compromises their ability to serve as the trusted advisor to the customer.

    We also didn’t think that Account Executives on the Sales team should ultimately own renewals and upsell* because of:

    1. Skill Set: Selling to an existing customer requires a different skill set from selling to a new customer. For example, analytical abilities are particularly valuable in R&E roles, given that more data on the customer is available. It’s important to be able to diagnose what has gone well and what hasn’t, and thoughtfully represent to the customer the delivered ROI.
    2. Workflow: Pursuing organic upsell and white space opportunities requires a different workflow from pursuing new business. It’s difficult for the same person to do both.
    3. Coordination: We wanted our CSMs’ efforts to help customers derive value to seamlessly contribute to the closing of the renewal and upsell; value delivery should directly drive financial outcomes. We risked eroding that linkage in working cross-functionally with Sales.

    Possibly for these 3 reasons, before our R&E Manager came on board, our AEs weren’t generating much upsell even though they had the opportunity to do so.

    *An important exception to this is our largest accounts, where sales into new divisions are similar to new business sales. For these accounts, the Account Executive on the Sales team continues to own the account post-sale.

    RACI Framework

    Our R&E Manager is accountable for the renewal and upsell; he has a quota for each (as described below). That allows the CSM to focus on helping the customer derive value from the product.

    Recall that a RACI framework can be helpful for dividing responsibility among different functions. (RACI stands for “Responsible,” “Accountable,” “Consulted”, and “Informed.”) We created the RACI below to delineate the roles of CSM and R&E Manager.

    R&E 1

    The Strategy Session is the kick-off meeting with the customer right after the purchase (see blog post on Success Plans). The CSM is accountable for the success of that meeting, but our R&E Manager will participate in order to get to know the customer’s objectives.

    The R&E Manager participates in the EBR as well. The vision is for him to paint the picture of the ROI of the customer’s investment in Gainsight, using the Success Plan as the source of truth for the customer’s objectives.

    He is accountable for all activities directly related to the renewal and upsell, but the CSM does continue to play a role. The R&E Manager learns from the CSM the history of the customer relationship, and he’ll inform the CSM of the renewal status on weekly calls leading up to the renewal. In general, the two parties are kept “Informed” of each other’s activities through Milestones, CTAs, Chatter updates, and the Success Plan on the Customer360 dashboard.

    CSMs are responsible for notifying the R&E Manager when it looks like another group or department at the customer would benefit from having licenses.

    We made the CSM accountable for selling one-time and managed Services, since they’re in general accountable for the value that the customer derives from the product, and Services can be critical for that. We might experiment further with this part of the RACI in the future.

    Compensation

    Here’s how to design a compensation plan for an R&E Manager.

    Step 1: Determine variable compensation. Variable pay is typically 50% of total OTE.

    Step 2: Assign a percentage of the variable pay that comes from renewals; the rest comes from upsell. Your company priorities should inform the split.

    Step 3: Determine the renewals quota. For any given quarter, we’ve set it equal to the company’s target for gross renewal rate, times the dollars eligible for renewal that quarter in the accounts that he owns.

    You’ll have to carve out an appropriate territory. If your renewals are especially straightforward or transactional, your R&E Manager could manage up to 2-3 renewals per business day.

    Step 4: Determine accelerators for renewals, e.g. related to the length of the contract.

    Step 5: Determine the upsell quota. You can calculate it by taking the variable pay that you’ve assigned to upsell, and divide it by the commission rate that the Sales team is using for new business. That’s because the commission rate on upsell should be the same as the commission rate for new business.

    Step 6: Determine accelerators for upsell. For example, you can increase the commission rate when the quarterly upsell quota is exceeded, and again when 150% of the quota is exceeded.

    Renewals Process

    Here’s how we use Gainsight to manage our renewals process.

    1. Avoid fire-fighting

    Using CTAs and scorecards, the CSM tracks 8 categories of risk to identify early signals that a customer is distressed and then address those situations. That way, the CSM can set up the R&E Manager for success.

    R&E 2

    2. Start the renewals process early

    The R&E Manager will receive a Call to Action 90 days ahead of the renewal. We review the strategy for and status of those renewals in a recurring meeting every Wednesday. The CSMs who work with those accounts join that meeting so that they can be kept informed.

    I also have a renewals dashboard that I review every Sunday:

    R&E 3

    3.  Prepare for calls

    Our R&E Manager never wants to be blindsided about an issue that a customer is facing while on a call about a renewal, so he checks the Customer360 dashboard beforehand.

    R&E 4

    4.  Develop a Success Plan for every customer

    He will be able to refer to the customer’s progress against their Success Plan when discussing the renewal. This is a great way to demonstrate ROI.

    R&E 5

    We’ll write more about our processes for Expansion in a later post. In the meantime, take a look at our expansion percentage calculator.

    ___

    If you’d like to discuss how to manage renewals and expansion at your company, feel free to reach out to Allison at apickens@gainsight.com. Follow her blog posts on Twitter at @PickensAllison.

    Vault Assets mentioned in this post

    (for Gainsight customers only)

    Here are ready-to-use versions of what you’ve seen in this post:

    • Open Renewals – Current and Next FQ (List) Report
    • December 3, 2015
    • Allison Pickens
    • 3 Comments
    • Best Practices, _Customer Success

    How We Built Our CSM Financial Model

    Allison Pickens is VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at Gainsight

    Why should you learn to build a financial model? You’re in Customer Success, not Finance.

    Think again. It’s critical for executives to understand the economics of their team. You need to be able to educate the Finance team about how to forecast key CSM metrics. You also need to be able to manage your team to achieve certain financial metrics, and to understand how various initiatives can affect those numbers.

    Here’s a financial model that I built for our team (Googledoc). Don’t worry: the numbers aren’t real. I’m providing this as a template, so that you can create your own model.

    The Basics

    A few principles for building a financial model:

    • Highlight your assumptions. Those are highlighted in yellow in the model.
    • All cells in black font should be formulas based on numbers in other cells. Never insert a raw number into a formula (e.g. =B5 + 10). All your assumptions should be highlighted in yellow.
    • Put time periods in the columns; put metrics in the rows.
    • Keep your model organized. Divide it into sections. Bold the most important metrics.
    • Create a section for every Customer Tier.

    Step 1: Determine the output

    The output of my financial model is the net fully loaded cost of CSM, divided by ARR. You’ll recall from my earlier blog post that I’m aiming for a 15% cost of CSM/ARR – in other words, I want to spend 15 cents on Customer Success for every $1 of ARR.

    Step 2: Project Your ARR

    This section of the model forecasts total ARR managed by a particular Customer Tier, including the effects of churn, upsell, and new customers.

    Blog post - Financial model 1

    I inserted a few key assumptions:

    1. Monthly churn rate:
      1. I could project a decrease if our board has asked for improved targets for churn, or if I believe that our process improvements will reduce churn in the future.
      2. If your business is mostly comprised of annual contracts, and if your sales team tends to close deals at the end of the quarter, then you’ll want to make the churn rate higher in the last month of the quarter.
    2. Average ARR of churned customers: Who is likely to churn? The answer is often smaller accounts.
    3. Monthly upsell rate: The same comments apply for upsell as for churn.
    4. Customers transitioned in/out: If you’re re-organizing your customer tiers, then indicate here how many customers you’ll transition into or out of another tier.
    5. New customers: Get a report from your Sales team that forecasts pipeline in each of your customer tiers. If your Sales team uses Salesforce, you can subscribe to their pipeline dashboard.
    6. ARR/customer: How large are the Sales team’s new deals? Do they expect to change their strategy for pricing, packaging, or discounting in the future?

    Step 3: Project Your Costs

    The output of this section is the fully loaded cost of the CSMs within the particular Customer Tier, as well as the fully loaded cost / ARR ratio.

    Blog post - Financial model 2

    Assumptions you’ll have to make:

    1. CSMs hired: Input how many CSMs you plan to hire in each month. You aim to should hire CSMs only when your net fully loaded cost / ARR ratio falls below 15%. That said, you might be willing to tolerate a high ratio for a period of time in order to accomplish some other company goal: increasing your NPS, increasing the frequency of customers offering sales references, etc.
    2. Average OTE / CSM: OTE means on-target earnings. This includes both base and bonus (or any commissions).
    3. Overhead: To simplify the model, I’ve assumed 20% overhead to cover benefit, office space, IT, etc. Note that I’m including a separate section for management and operations costs, discussed below.

    Step 4: Project Your ARR from Premier CSM

    Some CSM teams charge for higher levels of Customer Success. This helps them offset their costs. You might charge for Customer Success in some customer tiers but not others.

    The following section of the model helps you arrive at a net fully loaded cost of CSM / ARR ratio, in which the numerator (cost) is offset by ARR from the Premier CSM offering, for the given Customer Tier.

     

    Blog post - Financial model 3

    Assumptions you’ll have to make:

    1. Price of Premier CSM, and by what percentage it tends to be discounted: If you’re smart, you’ll create a policy with your Sales or Renewals/Expansion team so that sales managers cannot discount Premier.
    2. # of existing customers who newly purchase Premier: Forecast upsells of Premier to existing customers.
    3. % of new customers who purchase Premier: You’ll want this to be as high as possible. You might create a policy to mandate that customers with Product ARR that’s above a certain level are required to purchase Premier or else Premier ARR will be carved out of Product ARR.
    4. % attributable to CSM: Sometimes Premier offerings include Support as well as CSM. Work with your Finance team to understand what percentage of the Premier price you can attribute to CSM.

    Step 5: Add Management and Operations Costs

    Include any costs from non-CSM members of your team in this section, including yourself, managers of the tiers, and Customer Success Operations. Naturally, you’ll have just 1 section like this in your model; you won’t replicate this section for every Customer Tier (as you will for the sections above).

    Final output: the net fully loaded cost of CSM / ARR, including all customer tiers and including the cost of management.

    Blog post - Financial model 4


     

    If you have any questions about this blog post, or if you’d like to offer feedback, feel free to email Allison at apickens@gainsight.com. You can also follow her weekly blog posts on Twitter at @PickensAllison.

    • October 13, 2015
    • Allison Pickens
    • No Comments
    • Gainsight on Gainsight, _Customer Success

    How to Recognize & Reward Your CSMs

    Allison Pickens is VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at Gainsight

    “Risk.” “Avoiding churn.” “Early warning signs.”

    When your CSMs are talking about customers’ problems all day, it can take a toll on morale. Most CSM leaders want to make internal conversations more positive and celebrate all their achievements. Wouldn’t it be great if we could give our CSMs kudos more often?

    There are a few barriers to this:

    • If you’re a renewals-based business, then your renewals typically happen infrequently – maybe once a year for each customer.
    • Upsells may not happen more than a few times a year.
    • In large organizations, CSMs often aren’t directly responsible for closing the renewal. They may share credit with a renewals manager.
    • Response rates to NPS surveys are often ~10%, and an executive at a given customer typically won’t submit more than two ratings per year.
    • Many day-to-day CSM accomplishments are intangible or subjective, even if they are valuable – a productive meeting, the customer conveying a positive tone during a phone call, or a complimentary email.
    • Compliments from the customer aren’t always indicators of success. They might love your CSM but hate your product.
    • Even a secured renewal isn’t a strong measure of success. We all know customers who have renewed but aren’t using the product or won’t provide a reference.

    Marketing gets kudos when they generate MQLs. Sales Development Reps take credit when they generate SQLs. What should CSMs take credit for?

    I want a metric that is:

    • Objectively valuable: No one can contest the achievement.
    • A discrete unit: It’s clear when the achievement is complete.
    • Measurable: We can create a Gainsight dashboard to track our achievements.
    • Frequently achieved: We can recognize our achievements week-to-week.
    • Attributable to the CSM: No one can contest that the CSM is primarily responsible.

    Here’s what we came up with at Gainsight.

    Net New Green Customers.

    Specifically, customers that move from Red or Yellow to Green in our Habits Scorecard Measure. “Habits” is our term for adoption, since our goal is to encourage our customers to adopt good habits in using our product. (Note that Habits is one of our 8 Scorecard Measures described here)

    We initially created a Habits Scorecard Measure that looks like this:

    Green: At least x% of licensed users are daily active users of Cockpit (we took a 4-week rolling average)

    • Yellow: Some usage, but not daily active users of Cockpit
    • Red: No usage of Gainsight in the last week

    We wanted to see many customers using Cockpit daily. Customers that do so have probably transformed their CSMs’ workflow. This process transformation is one important way to derive value from Gainsight.

    That said, many customers who we knew used our product in a compelling way were in Yellow, grouped together with low-adopting customers. To accurately represent customers who were frequently using CoPilot, Customer360 dashboards, Gainsight Home, surveys, and other features, we created a fourth Habits level, called “Lime Green” (to show that this level is in between Green and Yellow):

    • Lime: At least y% of licensed users are daily active users (of any part of the product)

    So our current scorecard measure looks like this:

    • Green: At least x% of licensed users are daily active users of Cockpit
    • Lime: At least y% of licensed users are daily active users (of any part of the product)
    • Yellow: Some usage, but not daily actives
    • Red: No usage of Gainsight in the last week

    The next step was to create a metric related to our Habits Scorecard Measure, to recognize the CSMs who boosted customers’ habits. We created a target for the quarter:

    Move 20% of Yellow/Red customers to Green/Lime.

    Then we can track weekly the percentage of customers that move into Green/Lime. We review the following dashboard in our weekly CSM Team Meeting on Tuesdays. (The following dashboards are all sanitized; they contain fake data.) I’ll want to see that we’re increasing the percentage in Green/Lime overall as a team each week.

    CSM1

    We’ll then look at which customers moved between levels. The following dashboard shows customers that moved in the right direction:

    CSM2

    And this dashboard shows customers that moved in the wrong direction:

    CSM3

    In the chart below, you’ll see a stacked bar for every CSM, showing the percentage of that CSM’s customers that are in Green, Lime, Yellow, or Red at the beginning of the quarter. You can then create a similar chart to reveal the current percentages, by CSM, in order to showcase progress over time.

    CSM4

    Note that customers that move in the wrong direction – e.g. from Lime to Yellow – count against the target, which is based on the net percentage of customers moved into Green/Lime.

    CSM5

    Now, every Tuesday, I can congratulate my team members for new customers moved into Green or Lime! We even created a fun competition: we divided into teams that span customer segments, and the team with the highest achievement at end-of-quarter wins a margarita party (in honor of our new Lime level).

    Here are other benefits to rolling out these targets:

    • Accountability: Our CSM team is already accountable to our CEO and the board for boosting “habits” (strong adoption that indicates our customers are deriving value).
    • Insight: Targets allow us to see if we’re improving on an important dimension, and inspire conversations on what’s working and what isn’t.
    • Ownership: Give CSMs a sense of ownership and impact.
    • Prioritization: Give CSMs and team leaders an ability to prioritize work based on attainment of targets.
    • Significance: Having targets makes our investors and other execs recognize Customer Success as a function that is adding a ton of value. If we can say at the board meeting, “We made an additional 20% of our customers daily adopters last quarter,” our investors will take note. This might make a difference during budgetary conversations.

    Here are some frequently asked questions about our targets system. If you choose to roll out a similar system to your team, your CSMs will probably ask you these questions, so I’d recommend creating an FAQ guide in advantage.

    How should you define Green?

    • Usage of a feature (or group of features) that signals the customer is deriving high ROI from your product.
    • This feature is often (although not always) the stickiest part of your product.

    Given that every customer is different, how can you come up with a universal definition of Green / Lime?

    • It’s true that every customer is unique to some degree. One customer might be successful using your product but remain in Yellow. That said, it’s better to choose a metric that accurately represents the successfulness of 90% of your customers than have no metric at all.

    How should you treat accounts that are still in onboarding?

    • We’d suggest including only those customers that are in the CSMs’ scope of responsibility in the denominator.

    How should you treat accounts that have already told us they’re going to churn?

    • Mark them as “Will Churn” (which could be a Stage in your lifecycle) and exclude them from the denominator.

    How should you treat customers that have a lot of licenses that aren’t being used (and thus may be difficult to move into Green or Lime)?

    • This represents a major downsell risk, so I’d recommend working hard on moving this customer to Lime/Green.

    How should you treat any accounts to be transitioned from one CSM to another this quarter?

    • Set a deadline, at which point a CSM’s denominator will include all accounts that have already been transitioned to that CSM.
    • Exclude any accounts that the CSM plans to transition to someone else later in the quarter.
    • Offer extra credit (e.g. 3x the credit) for newly Green/Lime customers that have been transitioned to the CSM after the deadline.

     How should you treat customers that are “never” going to be Green/Lime because of organizational challenges (e.g. re-orgs, etc.)?

    • You should still include them in the denominator since this question contains a subjective assessment, and since offering too many exceptions will erode the integrity of the target. That said, this is a good opportunity to help your CSMs prioritize. You might want to have them spend more of their time on the customers that have potential.

    How should these targets apply in a Pooled CSM model, where CSMs don’t own accounts but instead share them?

    • Create a group target in this case, rather than a target for each individual CSM.
    Does it matter if you move a customer into Green vs. Lime?

    • In our case, for this quarter, we’re treating Green and Lime the same way. You could choose to treat them differently: e.g. you could give 2x the credit for a new Green customer and 1x the credit for a new Lime customer.

    How should the target affect CSMs’ bonuses?

      We’re in the middle of revising our bonus structure, but we’re going to consider making the attainment of this target affect the bonus. I expect to write a blog post about this at a future date.

    ___

     

    If you need help with the rules and reporting shown here, please respond to this email. We’re going to gauge interest in a webinar on this topic. You can follow Allison’s blog posts on Twitter at @PickensAllison. She also appreciates your comments on her posts, so you’re welcome to email her at apickens@gainsight.com.

    • September 29, 2015
    • Allison Pickens
    • 1 Comment
    • Best Practices, _Customer Success

    Hiring CSMs: 4 Principles You Probably Haven’t Heard

    A great deal has been written about how to hire CSMs, but CSM leaders continue to raise and debate the question. Here’s how we approach hiring at Gainsight. There are 4 principles that distinguish our approach:

    • Hire process-oriented people
    • Hire them, regardless of where they came from
    • Test, don’t guess
    • Hire ahead of schedule

    1. Hire process-oriented people

    Customer Success is the most operationally complex department in a SaaS company.

    Why is that? Here are some reasons, among others:

    1. Making a customer successful requires many different elements.
    2. Our success as a CSM team depends on our ability to work cross-functionally with several other departments.
    3. We have more data to work with than other departments. With data, comes responsibility.
    4. We need to adjust our approach to making customers successful with every major new product release.

    To handle this complexity, we need to create structure out of ambiguity. That is, we need to create processes. I previously wrote about only some of the more basic, required processes here; there’s a long list!

    To create thoughtful processes, you need a CS Ops lead, but you also need CSMs who proactively identify patterns in the challenges that they’re helping their customers overcome. I want to hire CSMs who don’t treat every problem as a one-off issue, but who dive into the root causes. That way, we can address those problems in the most effective, efficient way across the customer base.

    In other words, I want to hire CSMs who are process-oriented.

    Process-oriented CSMs also don’t treat an individual customer’s issue as a one-off problem for that account. They view that issue in the context of the broader situation, and design a process – a Success Plan – to get that customer back on track.

    Of course, process-orientation isn’t the only attribute that matters. We also evaluate candidates based on:

    • Communication skills:

      • Able to run a meeting with multiple stakeholders
      • Clear, articulate speaker
      • Poised, confident presence
      • Courageous, assertive
    • Problem-solving ability:

      • Curious about client’s business needs
      • Able to dissect those needs
      • Able to identify a product-based solution to those needs
      • Resourceful
    • Attitude:
      • Shows persistently positive attitude in the face of challenge
      • Passionate about tech, Gainsight, and making the customer successful
      • Has an empathetic, consultative approach

    That said, given that much of the history of customer success lies in “relationship management,” process-orientation is one of the most overlooked characteristics in the recruiting process, even though it is one of the most critical ones.

    2. Hire them, regardless of where they came from

    We will hire anyone who exhibits our 3 basic company values and can pass our rigorous screening and testing process. I don’t care if you worked at a hot tech company or if you come from a company I haven’t heard of. I don’t care if you have a Customer Success background. I don’t care if you are 25 years old or 55 years old. If you pass our test, you’re in.

    That’s a radical concept. We will hire the most talented people, regardless of where they come from.

    Of course, if your recruiter is doing outbound cold calls for you, s/he will have to screen for something. Otherwise, they’ll quickly exhaust their allotment of LinkedIn InMails.

    Still, let me challenge you: don’t just search for people with “Customer Success” in their title. Our industry is new enough that the talent pool in CSM is still relatively small. Here are some backgrounds that you might not have thought about investigating:

    • Operations managers. Look for people who have run internal cross-functional initiatives or PMOs.
    • Project managers in Services departments or at Services companies. They know how to design and run a smart process.
    • Management consultants. Look for people with experience at either implementation-focused firms, such as PwC, or strategy-focused firms, such as BCG.
    • MBAs. They’re dying to join tech companies and have the multi-disciplinary background that will help them think creatively about CS strategies.
    • Teachers. They have experience in training (teaching!) and know how to operate under stress.
    • Recent college grads (including those right out of college). They love to join rotational programs where they can get exposure to different departments – including CS, Services, Support, and others – to help inform their choice of a permanent home.

    What are the benefits of diversity? I see at least 3:

    • Because we look for talent anywhere we can find it, we’ve got a top-notch team.
    • Because team members have different opinions, we can cultivate the creative tension that allows our team to improve rapidly and continuously.
    • Because we’ve got a motley crew, we’ve had to get in the habit of demonstrating tolerance for and – even better! – admiration of our differences, which creates a better environment for everyone.

    3. Test, don’t guess

    Here’s another challenge: skim the candidate’s resume, then throw it out.

    If you’re going to hire talented people regardless of where they came from, you need an objective way to assess whether they’re truly talented. The resume typically doesn’t help much.

    One critical step in our recruiting process is a hypothetical client meeting. Here’s how it works:

    • We provide the candidate with the name of a real company that they should pretend is a Gainsight client.
    • We provide an old copy of an “introduction to Gainsight” deck, as well as screenshots from an old demo org.
    • The candidate prepares to hold a 45-minute, in-person, hypothetical client meeting. They assign roles to those of us who are on the interview panel (typically 3 people).
    • They walk us through the deck, hold a consultative, discovery conversation about how Gainsight would address the client’s business challenges, and conduct a demo to illustrate the solution.

    The candidate’s performance in this meeting tells us more than we could ever discover from a typical interview. Specifically:

    • Process orientation: Did s/he provide structure to the conversation, walking the client through a thoughtful process of discovery and solution identification?
    • Communication: Did the candidate show confidence and poise when presenting to a group that includes executives?
    • Problem-solving: Did s/he demonstrate curiosity by asking questions about the client’s business? Was s/he able to problem-solve on the fly, by matching Gainsight’s capabilities with the client’s challenges?
    • Attitude: Did the candidate do enough research about our value proposition and our solution to signal his/her passion for the role?

    Simulating an activity that the candidate would actually have to do on the job is the best way to assess whether they would be good at it.

    4. Hire ahead of schedule

    Look at your account loads right now. Do any of your CSMs have spare capacity?

    If not, then what will happen if one of your CSMs quits or is let go? What will happen if your Sales team beats their target in Q3? Not having a CSM to assign new accounts can make for a bad customer experience. On the other hand, if you assign additional accounts to a CSM who’s already at capacity, you can create a morale problem.

    In Customer Success, more than in other departments, it’s important to have spare bandwidth. Tell your boss that it’s important for you to hire ahead of schedule.

    Hold your team managers accountable for hiring ahead. We automatically assign accounts to our 3 teams based on the segmentation model that I described in an earlier blog post. Automatic assignment, along with a publicly viewable sales pipeline report in Salesforce, empowers each team manager to anticipate their hiring needs a couple of months in advance.

    I consider hiring an A+ team one of my most important responsibilities. The principles above have made it possible.


    If you have comments or questions about best practices for hiring, feel free to email Allison at apickens@gainsight.com. You can follow Allison’s blog posts on Twitter at @PickensAllison.

    • September 14, 2015
    • Allison Pickens
    • No Comments
    • Best Practices, _Customer Success

    How to Transform Your CSM Operation: Smart Processes

    Allison Pickens is VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at Gainsight

    The goal of our Customer Success team at Gainsight is to help you transform your CSM operation. Here’s our view of how that transformation happens:

    ROI - 1

    Note that a “process” is the critical unit in the transformation: it’s the solution for tackling a given business challenge.That’s why our Gainsight CSM team focuses on helping you design effective processes within Gainsight.

    What’s a process? An effective one often has the following elements:

    • Pain point: There is a pain point (i.e. business challenge) that you’re trying to solve.
    • Objective: There is a clear definition of success in alleviating that pain, and a corresponding metric to indicate the degree of success.

    • Roles of key participants (including the CSM and members of other departments) are clear via a RACI.

      • R: Responsible,
      • A: Accountable,
      • C: Consulted, or
      • I: Informed
    • Project plan of steps exists to guide each participant in executing their responsibilities, thereby reinforcing the RACI.
    • Reminders to each participant reinforce that division of responsibilities, making sure everyone participates in the right way.
    • Meeting (optional but often beneficial): There is a regular meeting amongst the participants to work through the designated steps. If there’s a meeting on the calendar, then the work gets done!
    • Evaluation: Performance of the participants is evaluated based on attainment of the metrics above.
    • Escalation: There is a way to involve senior management in addressing any major problems that arise.

    Gainsight provides a platform for you to build smart processes. Below is a checklist of common CSM business challenges and the processes that can address them.

    Which challenges are familiar to you? Have you built processes for them within Gainsight? If not, then contact your CSM.

    ROI - 2

    ROI - 3

    ROI - 4 (1)

    Note the critical role of the Customer Success Operations Manager in designing these processes. Learn more about that role here.

    If you have questions about how to create these processes in Gainsight, feel free to reach out to your Gainsight CSM. You can also follow Allison’s blog posts on Twitter at @PickensAllison.

     

    • August 31, 2015
    • Allison Pickens
    • No Comments
    • Gainsight on Gainsight, _Customer Success

    VPs of Customer Success: Here’s How I Run the Team

    Allison Pickens is VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at Gainsight

    Note to Gainsight Customers: This post contains links to Vault Assets you can import directly into Gainsight.

    There’s nothing worse than waking up on Monday morning and feeling disorganized.  Here’s how I get a handle on our business.

    One note: All dashboards in this blog post have been sanitized to protect our customers’ confidentiality. Don’t worry, this isn’t real data ☺

    Monday

    Our weekly leadership team meeting is at 8am on Monday morning.  During that meeting, we spend 30 minutes discussing the most important risks in our customer base.  

    To do that, we create a filtered view of Cockpit that covers only Flagged Risk Calls to Action (CTAs) for customers that surpass a certain ARR threshold.  Check out my earlier blog posts on how we use risk CTAs and how we handle escalations in order to understand how we arrive at this filtered set of “top risks.”  Here are the basics:

    1. We trigger 8 different categories of risk CTAs
    2. Each category is owned by a particular executive on our leadership team – i.e. they are accountable for resolving risks in that category.
    3. CSMs click on the flag icon on CTAs in order to escalate them – i.e. to signal that this is a risk that needs greater attention
    4. We review Flagged Risk CTAs for large accounts in our leadership team meeting

    This meeting is the perfect forum for our CEO and myself to ensure we’re aligned with other department heads on the right way to address important customer challenges.  Here’s the Cockpit view:

    unnamed

     

    In the screenshot above, you’ll see examples such as Support Risk (owned by our head of Support) and Launch Risk (owned by our head of Services, who runs the onboarding team).  For each CTA, our CEO turns to the department head responsible for that risk area and initiates a discussion about what we’re doing to resolve that risk.

    Preparation for this meeting: Our Customer Success Operations lead sends an email to each department head, reminding them to prepare to discuss the risks in their area.  She also joins the relevant portion of our leadership team meeting to help moderate the discussion.

    Tuesday

    Our CSM team meeting is on Tuesdays.  We spend most of the time discussing new initiatives – we’re always innovating! – but we’ll kick off the meeting by discussing our CSM “State of the Union” dashboard.   The goal is to cultivate a common understanding of how we’re doing as a team.  

    As I described in this post blog on Scorecards ,

    our CSM team is responsible for 3 Scorecard Measures:

    1. Habits
    2. Sentiment
    3. Company

    Habits refers to the degree to which the customer is adopting the product in a way that signals they are deriving value.  We don’t just care that customers are logging in – we want them to use certain features in the product that correlate with a high return on investment from using Gainsight.

    Sentiment refers to the degree to which the customer is happy.  This scorecard is based primarily on Net Promoter Score (NPS).

    Our Company scorecard measure signals the degree to which the company environment enables the customer to derive strong value from Gainsight.  If an executive leaves the company, or if there’s a re-organization effort underway, that can affect the company’s strategy for using Gainsight.  We’ll want to re-align with the customer on the right strategy in those circumstances.

     Therefore, we review the following dashboards:

    1. Habits scorecard measure over time

    unnamed-1

     

    We want to increase the percentage of customers showing “Green Habits.”  Using the dashboard below, we’ll explore the number of customers who moved from Yellow to Green or Red to Yellow last week, as well as the number of customers who moved in the opposite direction.

    unnamed-2

     

    We’ll click on the bars in order to see which customers moved, and which CSMs were responsible.  

    This is a great opportunity to give “kudos” to the CSMs who have helped their customers adopt the product more fully.  We talk about risks so often in customer success; it’s important to celebrate our victories, too!

    unnamed

     2. Newly received Net Promoter Ratings 

    We conduct a monthly NPS survey (sent to a different subset of our customer base each time), and we typically receive new responses weekly.  

    unnamed-3

    We’ll click on the bars to see the specific customers that submitted ratings last week. This is a second opportunity to offer kudos, recognizing CSMs who received promoter scores.

    1. We review Company Risk CTAs in our Friday team meeting. I’ll return to that below. 

    Preparation for this meeting: I review the dashboards in advance, as well as prepare for discussions on process improvements.

    Wednesday

    On Wednesdays I have a weekly meeting on upcoming Renewals, Potential Opt-outs, and Upsells with the CSMs and our new Renewals & Expansion Manager.  We discuss our forecast and brainstorm together about any challenging renewals.

    unnamed-4

    unnamed-5

    Preparation for this meeting: I ask our Renewals &

    Expansion Manager, who owns those CTAs, to post Chatter updates to the Renewals and Upsell CTAs about the next steps.   

    Thursday

    On Thursdays I have 1:1s with the team leaders.  We review 2 dashboards: 

    1. Habits dashboard for their team

    The following chart shows our Habits scorecard measure for each customer segment, week-over-week (although as noted above, we’ve sanitized the data for the sake of confidentiality).

     unnamed-6

    I’ll ask questions such as:

    • What factors are making your Green customers successful?  
    • What factors are making your Red customers unsuccessful?
    • What are some holistic (rather than one-time) solutions to moving more customers into Green?  What process improvements can we make?
    • Which customers are most likely to move into Green, with some additional effort?

    2. Flagged CTAs in Cockpit

    unnamed-7

    The team leader may need help in resolving certain Flagged CTAs with his/her team members.  We’ll discuss those, agree on an action plan, and post the next steps to the Chatter feed on the CTA.

    Preparation required: Each team leader reminds their team members to confirm the accuracy of their scorecards and update certain CTAs if needed.  Recall that our scorecard measures are linked to CTAs, so the CSM will need to open, close, or flag CTAs in order to update the scorecards to ensure they reflect the customer’s situation.

    unnamed-1

    Friday

    On Fridays we have another CSM team meeting, to brainstorm as a group about particular customer situations.  We’ll look at a filtered view of Cockpit for that meeting as well.  In the future, as our team grows, we’ll likely split this meeting into several – one for each customer segment. 

    COMPANY RISK:

    unnamed-3

    BAD HABITS RISK:

    unnamed-2

     SENTIMENT RISK:

     unnamed-4

    Preparation required: CSMs review their Flagged CTAs and choose any that they’d like to discuss during the team meeting.

    Sunday

    On Sundays, I prepare for the week ahead by reviewing closed renewals and upsells, as well as the above-mentioned State of the Union dashboard, since I’ll share this during our Monday leadership team meeting and our Tuesday CSM team meeting.

    unnamed-8

    If you have questions about how to create these dashboards, feel free to reach out to your Gainsight CSM or to Allison at apickens@gainsight.com.  You can also follow Allison’s blog posts on Twitter at @PickensAllison.

    Vault Assets mentioned in this post

    (for Gainsight customers only)

    Here are ready-to-use versions of what you’ve seen in this post:

    • Recent NPS responses (Last 90 days) Report
    • Open Renewals List Report
    • Open Upsells List Report
    • Renewal Closed this Quarter List Report
    • Upsell Closed this Quarter List Report
    • Renewal & Upsell ARR by Opportunity Type (Current Quarter) Report
    • Open Renewals – Current and Next FQ Report
    • August 24, 2015
    • Allison Pickens
    • No Comments
    • Executive Perspective, Gainsight on Gainsight, _Customer Success

    How to Segment Your Customers & Make Tough Trade-offs

    Allison Pickens is VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at Gainsight

    I’ve previously written about how CSM leaders can take on cross-functional leadership roles. Here’s another opportunity for cross-functional leadership: crystalizing your company’s segmentation strategy. CSM leaders are well positioned to coordinate this initiative, given their exposure to how different types of customers fare in post-sales. We also need to segment customers in CSM specifically, in order to scale effectively our own teams.

    Our leadership team recently convened to determine how to segment our customer base and define our strategy for working with each segment. Here’s how we did it.

    <>

    Understand Your Customers’ Needs

    As a first step, we needed to understand what customers needed from us in order to be successful. We started to realize that customers clustered into certain segments:

    • Companies that needed guidance in shaping the evolution of their customer success organization, in addition to guidance in defining a strategy for using Gainsight. They wanted us to support the change management effort led by their PMO. (PMO stands for project management office, which is a team created for a particular initiative to ensure its successful roll-out.) In addition, these companies want to significantly influence our product roadmap.
    • Companies that were already experts in growing their organizations, but that needed guidance in executing their customer success strategy within Gainsight.
    • Companies that were just starting to build their customer success teams and wanted to digest all the information they could get about best practices.

    I was able to detect these trends by talking with our CSMs, talking with other executives who had been involved in accounts, and especially by directly getting involved with customers, in order to witness these patterns firsthand.

    We named these 3 segments as follows:

    • Strategic
    • Enterprise / Midmarket
    • SMB

    Understand Your Customers’ Value to You

    We also needed to understand the value that each of these segments provided to Gainsight. It may be controversial but still important to ask, should we actually serve each of these segments? The segments above offer us the following value:

    • Strategic

      1. Huge expansion potential
      2. High retention rates
    • Enterprise / Midmarket

      1. Strong brand value
      2. Significant ARR and high retention rates
    • SMB

      1. Fast sales cycle
      2. High advocacy rate
      3. Substantial product feedback
      4. This segment forces us to do more with greater constraints, given that we can’t afford to spend huge amounts of time with them. Therefore, much of our internal innovation in CSM processes comes from our work with SMBs.

    It’s also worth noting any difficulties you have in serving each of these segments, in order to assess the value of serving that segment, net of any challenges.

    Delineate Between Segments

    We carved out these 3 segments based on ARR. We used ARR as the deciding factor because the customer clusters that I described above approximately corresponded to certain ARR ranges, although the correlation wasn’t perfect.   Even so, anchoring on a financial metric makes it easier to define the right engagement model (and thus the proper amount of investment) for each segment.

    The segments we’re using correspond nicely with the ones used in Sales, but they don’t align perfectly, since Sales doesn’t know upfront what the ARR will be. Instead, the Sales team segments based on employee count, as shown on the company’s LinkedIn page.

    Here’s how we delineated among segments:

    • Strategic: Customers that either present a major upsell opportunity (e.g. into a new division) or help us open up a market for a new use case for Gainsight. These are our highest potential ARR customers.
    • Enterprise/Midmarket: Customers above a certain ARR threshold that are not Strategic
    • SMB: Customers below a certain ARR threshold that are not Strategic

    We designate Strategic customers early in the sales cycle, with input from our VP of Sales. We’ve divided the Strategic segment into industry verticals, with a Director overseeing each one. That’s because it helps to accumulate industry-specific knowledge in this segment: in order to serve large companies, we need to capture industry-specific use cases, and feed those back to our Product team.

    Note that segments 2 and 3 are defined based on ARR rather than potential ARR: upsell potential for these customers is more limited, so it’s a fine approximation to use current ARR. This method accelerates account assignment for new customers, so that you don’t have to estimate upsell potential in each case.

    Make Trade-offs

    Once we had defined the 3 segments, we needed to decide on our model for serving them in both Sales and Post-Sales. We returned to the question above, “what does each customer type need from us in order to be successful?”, except that this time, we kept in mind what we could afford to do when addressing those needs.

    “What you can afford” all comes back to one number: your maximum ratio for net CSM fully-loaded cost / ARR.

    Our target is 15%.

    That number is affected by the following factors:

    • ARR / account
    • # of accounts / CSM
    • Cost / CSM, including overhead
    • Pricing for post-sales, i.e. charging for certain levels of support or CSM

    We can change any of these variables, but at the end of the day, we have to make sure that they multiply to less than 15% for each customer segment. Here’s how you can influence those factors.

    ARR / account: Hire a Renewals & Expansion manager to improve retention and upsell, or influence your sales team to increase the average selling price (ASP). Sales can increase their ASP by instilling more discipline, improving the sales process, hiring solutions consultants, introducing a different hiring profile for AEs, or introducing a new pricing package, among other strategies.

    # of accounts / CSM: Limit the amount of time spent on each account. To this end, you can run 1:many programs, standardize your onboarding process, be more prescriptive about how to use your product, or introduce greater specialization among CSMs to avoid re-creating the wheel in every customer interaction. A pooled CSM model can involve specialization, in that each type of touch point could be handled by a different subject-matter expert.

    Cost / CSM: Hire more junior people, or hire in a less expensive location.

    Pricing for post-sales: Introduce a model where you charge for premium Support and/or CSM, to offset your costs.

    The context for your business will determine which paths to 15% are most feasible, and therefore which trade-offs are more desirable.   For example, if your sales team has difficulty increasing prices, but your customers are willing to tolerate less time spent with their CSM, then the best path to 15% may involve increasing the number of accounts per CSM.

    Define the Lifecycle

    Once you’ve made those tough trade-offs, formalize them by defining the lifecycle touches for each segment. I’ve described some of our lifecycle touches here.

    If you have questions about how to segment your customers, feel free to reach out to your Gainsight CSM or to Allison at apickens@gainsight.com. You can also follow Allison’s blog posts on Twitter at @PickensAllison.

     

    • August 17, 2015
    • Allison Pickens
    • 1 Comment
    • Customer Segmentation, _Customer Success

    Our Escalation Process & Executive Sponsor Program at Gainsight

    Allison Pickens is VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at Gainsight

    In a previous post, I shared how we manage risk at Gainsight, using Scorecards and Calls to Action (CTAs) for each of 8 risk areas. Even after we implemented this risk framework on our team, CSMs wondered, “Who do I ask for help when a risk arises?”

    We wanted to involve senior executives in addressing these risks, but we also needed to avoid overburdening them as we scale. Instead, we wanted to empower our highly capable Team Leaders to be the “first line of defense,” and also enable CSMs to channel issues to the people who were best equipped to help resolve them.

    With those goals in mind, we designed 2 processes:

    1. Escalation Process
    2. Executive Sponsor Program

    (1) Escalation Process

    Our Escalation process has one simple rule of thumb:

    Flag a CTA when you need help.

    1 - Escalation

    Recall that you can flag a CTA by clicking on the icon on the left-hand side of a CTA, causing it to turn orange.

    Here’s who can help when a CSM flags a CTA.

    Escalation Level 1:

    A. Team Leader

    • We conduct 1-on-1’s using Cockpit. The team leader reviews all CTAs with the CSM, but focuses on Flagged ones.
    • The CSM’s team leader immediately notices a CTA if the team member @-mentions the leader in the Chatter section of the CTA.

    B. Rest of Team

    • We have 2 team meetings each week. Our Tuesday meeting is focused on process improvements (we’re constantly innovating!). Our Friday meeting is focused on troubleshooting customer challenges.   At that meeting, we discuss Flagged CTAs related to the risk areas that solely the CSM team is accountable for: Habits, Sentiment, and Company Risk. (Note that other teams at Gainsight are accountable for the other 5 risk areas, according to our RACI.)   We also discuss Flagged CTAs related to upcoming Renewals. This meeting provides the CSM with a venue to brainstorm with others who may have encountered similar issues.

    C. Other Post-Sales Teams

    • At our Support Risk meeting on Wednesdays, CSMs work with our Support team to resolve Flagged Support Risk CTAs (i.e. when support tickets have high volume, urgency, or duration).
    • At our Implementation Risk meeting on Fridays, CSMs work with our Services team to resolve Flagged Implementation Risk CTAs (i.e. when an implementation milestone is delayed).

    D. Other Departments

    • For other risk areas (Readiness, Product, and Bugs Risk), the corresponding departments review all Flagged CTAs in real time.
    • Importantly, our Leadership Team meetings on Mondays include a 30-minute section on customers, in which we review all Red Scorecards for customers above a certain ARR threshold. As my last blog post explained, Scorecards update to Red when there is a Flagged CTA.

    Level 2: VP of Customer Success (me)

    The Team Leader can escalate an issue to me if s/he needs help, by @-mentioning me on the CTA. The Team Leaders know that I especially want to get involved when:

    • An upcoming renewal is at risk
    • The customer has a red Habits Scorecard – i.e. their adoption is very low. Typically this means that the customer needs a re-vamped strategy for adopting Gainsight.
    • The Executive Decision-Maker at the account has left or changed roles (a form of Company Risk). In this case, I’ll want to align with the new executive.

    Level 3: CEO

    I will escalate to our CEO at times, typically when he has a prior relationship with a particular customer. I can also get his thoughts on a particular risk during our Leadership Team meeting on Mondays, as described above.

    ___

    This process helps ensure methodical escalations from the CSM, to the Team Leader, to me, to our CEO. This might sound great in theory, but how do you make sure the team is bought into the process? Here’s how we did it.

    Step 1: Limit Confusion

    We showed the team the ripple effects from flagging a CTA. We explained in detail the escalation levels above.

    Step 2: Align on Strategy

    We’ve talked for a while as a team about the principle that Scorecards represent the “source of truth” for whether a customer is at risk. If a customer has many green Scorecards, but the CSM believes that they are at risk, they should open a Manual CTA, causing a Scorecard to update to yellow, and then to red if the CSM chooses to flag the CTA.

    Step 3: Make it Ingrained in Day-to-Day Meetings

    Team Leaders started reviewing the Scorecard dashboard view with CSMs at the start of every 1-on-1, before diving into Cockpit. That way, the Team Leader can “cover all bases” by asking about any customers that are in green, which won’t typically show up in Cockpit.This process encourages CSMs to open risk CTAs whenever they detect a problem. 

    2 - Escalation Process

    (2) Executive Sponsor Program

    At one point in Gainsight’s history, we had an internal executive sponsor for every account, but this became unsustainable fairly quickly. We designed a new exec sponsor program that is intended to last only through the end of 2015, assuming that our Sales team performs at target, and assuming that each sponsor has the bandwidth to do 1 customer call per week. In January, we’ll design a new program for the first half of the year.

    Here’s the Why, Which, Who, How, When, and What:

    Why:

    1. To uncover latent challenges in our larger accounts
      1. Higher ARR or brand value means that more management attention is needed.
      2. We customize our approach for larger accounts, meaning that more intimate knowledge of the account is required than CSM team leaders generally have the bandwidth to acquire for every account.
    2. To give Gainsight executives across departments exposure to real customer issues in depth. This awareness helps our VP of Product design better products, helps our VP of Sales design a better sales process, etc.

    Which: Accounts that surpass a certain ARR threshold, covering our Enterprise team (high-touch) and our Strategic team (super high-touch).

    Who: Most executives on our leadership team, plus several Director-level leaders.

    How: When there is a new customer above the ARR threshold, the Team Leader assigns an Executive Sponsor. S/he will take into account any pre-existing relationships, including whether an executive was involved during the sales cycle, as well as which executive is best suited to address the particular needs of that customer.

    When:

    • Enterprise accounts: 30-minute check-in 1x per quarter
    • Strategic accounts: 30-minute check-in 1x per month
    • Whenever the CSM, Team Leader, or VP (myself) asks for the sponsor’s help

    What: Email the person at the account with the role “Executive Decision-Maker” to schedule the call. (We track roles for customer contacts in Gainsight.) Questions to cover:

    1. How are things going? What is going well? Poorly?
    2. Do you believe we are on the right path to meet your objectives when you bought Gainsight?
    3. Any feedback for us?

    Note that we’re leveraging executives with the principal goal of uncovering challenges at the customer’s executive level, which may escape detection from both our Rules Engine and the CSM. The primary goal isn’t to escalate to sponsors. This ensures that execs aren’t swamped with crisis management, and also that we have another mechanism for detecting risks at our largest accounts.

    You’ll need a couple of CTAs to run this program:

    (1) CTA reminding the Exec Sponsor to reach out to the customer

    – Owner: Exec Sponsor

    – Timing: For Enterprise accounts, every 3 months. For Strategic accounts, every 1 month.

    – Playbook: Include the list of questions described in the “What” section above.

    (2) Add a task to the playbook for your New Customer CTA, so that an Exec Sponsor is assigned.

    If you have questions about how to implement your own Escalation Process or Executive Sponsor Program, feel free to reach out to your Gainsight CSM or to Allison at apickens@gainsight.com. You can also follow Allison’s blog posts on Twitter at @PickensAllison.

     

    • August 10, 2015
    • Allison Pickens
    • No Comments
    • Executive Perspective, Gainsight on Gainsight, _Customer Success

    Gainsight’s One to Many Strategy

    Allison Pickens is VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at Gainsight

    • “My CSMs are overworked.”
    • “They spend a ton of time on repetitive activities, but we’re not sure how to automate those.”
    • “We want to email segments of our customers, but we can’t get access to the email automation system because Marketing manages it.”

    These are common refrains among Customer Success teams. To address these challenges at Gainsight, our CSM team often engages with our customers through a 1:many method (i.e. 1 communication reaches many customers). This blog post will focus on one tactic in a 1:many program: email. At Gainsight we use CoPilot, our email automation functionality, for this purpose.

    In this blog post, I’ll cover 3 topics related to 1:many Communications:

    1. Strategy
    2. People
    3. Process 

    1. Strategy

    Your 1:many strategy should start with a strong understanding of your Customer Lifecycle. From there, you can pinpoint the role of 1:many communications.

    As you’ll see in the diagram below, we have 4 stages in our Lifecycle. To guide customers along the right journey, we use 2 approaches:

    1. CSM Touches: 1:1 interactions between the CSM and the customer. They lay the groundwork for the customer relationship.
    2. Tech Touches: Provide air cover for the CSM in two ways: first, by “warming up” the customer to certain concepts, thus enhancing the value of subsequent 1:1 interactions; and second, by replacing certain 1:1 interactions.

    1 - 1-Many

    We use Calls to Action (CTAs) in Cockpit to remind the CSM when to reach out at critical points in the customer lifecycle. We use CoPilot for Tech Touches.

    Let’s walk through how we use Tech Touches to complement CSM Touches.

    2 - 1-Many

    To execute your own Lifecycle Strategy using Gainsight, we recommend filling out a spreadsheet like the one below. You can also contact your CSM to get a copy of the Google doc that we use. Once you complete and share the table with your team, every CSM will know when they should expect to receive certain CTAs, and when their customers will receive certain 1:many communications.

    3 - 1-Many

    I’d recommend creating a table for each of your customer segments. You’ll likely rely on 1:many communications more for your lower-touch customers, as well as for other customers for whom you have a highly standardized customer lifecycle.

    Look for 2 signals when carving out a role for 1:many outreaches:

    a. The CSM is performing a repetitive activity that guides the customer along the right journey.

    At the end of each day of the onboarding workshop that I mentioned in a previous post, we send customers a 1:many email that describes what they implemented that day and how to roll it out to their team. This helps us boost adoption early in onboarding. Despite the usefulness of this content, I’d prefer that the CSM didn’t spend their time copying the same email template a dozen times.

    b. Customer has already strayed from the prescribed journey.

    When a customer’s adoption of a particular feature is low, they receive an automated email from us with content on the value of that feature and best practices for using it.


    2. People

    Despite how magical our communication strategy may seem, our 1:many outreaches don’t come out of the ether. We have a dedicated 1:Many Communications lead (a member of the Customer Success organization) who designs and executes these Tech Touches.

    This team member is responsible for contributing to the attainment of key metrics for the customer segment(s) they support:

    • Time to value (i.e. time in onboarding)
    • Adoption
    • Net Promoter Score
    • Gross retention
    • Upsell rate
    • Accounts per CSM (since effective 1:many activities should free up time for CSMs to manage more customers)

    The 1:many lead should cover the following activities (including but not limited to managing email outreaches):

    Design and implement a Lifecycle Strategy

    • Design the lifecycle stages, cadence of Tech Touches, and when CSMs should reach out, for each customer tier, to create a comprehensive engagement program
    • Segment the customer base and target content to the right segments to ensure high relevance
    • Determine how various forms of 1:many outreach (emails, webinars, videos, NPS surveys, Community, support hub, etc.) should all work together
    • Operate those tools to support the CSM team’s goals of driving key metrics, including time-to-value, adoption, NPS, retention, up-sell, and accounts per CSM
    • Define success metrics, to test and optimize the Lifecycle Strategy

    Schedule automated outreaches, in accordance with that strategy

    • Manage CoPilot (email automation product in Gainsight)
    • Craft effective email templates
    • Automate as much of his/her job as possible by scheduling ongoing outreaches to be distributed automatically

    Collaborate cross-functionally to:

    • Source content from the Customer Success, Training, and Product teams
    • Coordinate outreaches to customers with the Marketing team, which may contact customers about advocacy opportunities or brand-related topics. Could involve maintaining a communications calendar

    Manage your NPS survey program

    • Determine the frequency of surveys
    • Use the survey functionality within Gainsight to distribute them
    • Use dashboards to analyze quantitative results (e.g. how does NPS vary across personas, such as executive sponsors and system administrators)
    • Summarize qualitative feedback and share with other departments

    Some companies have a full team of 1:many communications managers that focus on a Tech-Touch-Only segment of customers (i.e. that have no 1:1 interactions with CSMs). Companies that are small or that don’t have this type of segment may hire a single 1:Many lead to complement CSM Touches across the customer base.

    Note that this role reports into Customer Success, not Marketing. We’ve divided responsibilities as follows:

    • Activities that drive the CSM team’s metrics (above) are handled by the CSM team. We use CoPilot for email outreaches.
    • Activities that drive new business (top-of-the-funnel, new deals) are handled by Marketing or Sales. Marketing and Sales use other email automation solutions.

    3. Process

    Your process will need to address a few questions:

    1. How do CSMs know what emails their customers have received?

    We built a table in the Customer360 dashboard for each customer that summarizes the emails they’ve received. If the CSM notices that the customer hasn’t opened a particular email even though the topic is critical for them, they can re-send the content with a customized note.

    4 - 1-Many

    2. In what circumstances would it make sense for the CSM, rather than the 1:many lead, to send emails through CoPilot?

    We try to send as many outreaches as possible through our 1:many lead, since this is more efficient than each CSM sending their own.   However, certain situations warrant the CSM taking the lead, e.g.:

    • CSM is traveling to a particular city and wants to schedule meetings with customers only in that area
    • CSM reminds customers of his/her upcoming vacation
    • CSM wants to “go above and beyond” by sending content to his/her customer base – for example, about a product release.

    3. How do you know whether your 1:Many communications strategy is successful?

    • Keep an eye on email performance metrics: open rate and click rate. A/B test your templates by sending one template to half your customer base and another template to the other half; see which performs better.
    • As you become more advanced, you’ll want to see which emails are most effective in driving milestone attainment and adoption.

    5 - 1-Many

    If you have questions about how to implement your own 1:Many Strategy, feel free to reach out to your Gainsight CSM or to Allison at apickens@gainsight.com. You can also follow Allison’s blog posts on Twitter at @PickensAllison.

     

    • July 28, 2015
    • Allison Pickens
    • 3 Comments
    • Gainsight on Gainsight, _Customer Success

    Best-in-Class Onboarding: Make It Happen Using Gainsight

    Allison Pickens is VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at Gainsight.

    Last week, I wrote about how Customer Success can play a critical role in enabling cross-functional collaboration. This week, I’ll explore in detail one of those cross-functional processes: Onboarding Management.

    At Gainsight, our Onboarding team (which we call Services) is distinct from our Customer Success team. In other organizations, CSMs are responsible for onboarding. Either way, companies need a process for ensuring that customers are onboarded in a timely way.

    Here are the critical attributes of our onboarding process:

    1. Standardization
    2. Operational Management
    3. Reporting
    1. Standardization

    Several months ago, we standardized our onboarding process, called Express, for a large segment of new customers. Standardization allows us to identify specific milestones that every customer within that segment should achieve, within standard timeframes. Those milestones include the following:

    • Kick-off: Project Manager explains the plan and instructs the customer to complete certain pre-work before the Workshop (below).
    • Readiness Checkpoint: The Project Manager confirms that a certain percentage of the pre-work has been completed.
    • Workshop: Customer participates in a workshop to implement about 60% of functionality.
    • Step 7 – Engagement: Complete the integration of data on customer engagement data.
    • Step 8 – Health Scorecard: Configure automatic calculation of customer health from NPS, support, and usage data.
    • Step 9 – Engagement Analytics: Implement analytics on client usage data and ability to export reports for client meetings or for internal executive and board reviews.
    • Step 10 – Cohort Success Communications: Configure ability to send automated email communications to cohorts based on usage data.
    • Step 11 – Triggered Engagement Rules: Implement automated Calls-to-Action for CSMs based on engagement data.

    We specify due dates for each of these milestones.

    Note that when a customer’s needs aren’t met by this implementation process, we create a custom scope of work (SOW) instead. However, typical Gainsight customers benefit from this standard process, given that our accumulated knowledge of how best to implement Gainsight is embedded into it.

    1. Operational Management

    We aim to manage every post-sales process within Gainsight, typically Cockpit. So we have Calls to Action (CTAs) for our onboarding process. The standardized nature of our onboarding process allows us to easily create standard automated CTAs.

    Here’s how our CTAs work:

    1. Rule: We set up rules in Rules Engine so that when the customer doesn’t reach a milestone within a certain number of days of the deadline, the Project Manager receives a CTA in Cockpit. (We call it a “Launch Risk” CTA in the second screenshot below.) Here’s an example of a Launch Risk rule:

    1

    1. Flag: If the Project Manager needs help in getting the customer back on track, s/he will “flag” the CTA, by clicking on the icon on the left-hand side so that it becomes orange (see below).

    2

    1. Meeting: Then, at our weekly Onboarding Risk meeting, we review all flagged onboarding CTAs. Both Project Managers and CSMs attend that meeting.
    1. Resolution: At the meeting, the Project Manager can get help from 2 places: (1) his/her manager, or (2) the CSM, who can advise on the next steps or reach out to the customer to investigate the cause of the delay. The Project Manager notes the next steps in Comments on the CTA.

    3

    1. Ongoing Communication: We use Chatter to communicate updates on the resolution.

    4

    1. Reporting

    We want to make sure that all stakeholders in our organization are aware when a customer’s onboarding is at risk. Those stakeholders include the following.

    A. Individual Contributors: Need to align on CTA and associated Playbook

    • Project Manager
    • CSM for that customer

    B. Operational Managers: Need to track CTA closure and trends therein

    • Director of Services, who manages that Project Manager
    • Director of CS, who manages that CSM

    C. Executive Team: Need to know onboarding status for top accounts, and trends in onboarding

    • VP of Services
    • VP of CS (me)
    • Other members of the executive team

    D. CEO and Board: Need to know trends in onboarding

    Operational Managers (B) use filtered views of Cockpit to view outstanding CTAs, filtering on Reason = Launch Risk. That’s the same filtered view that we look at during the weekly Onboarding Risk meeting.

    Operational Managers also have dashboards that allow them to see trends in CTAs – including a chart on CTAs by Project Manager (in the screenshot below), and a chart showing the number of outstanding Launch Risk CTAs each week.

    5

     

     

    As noted above, the Executive Team (C) and CEO and Board (D) don’t want to get in the weeds of every single case of onboarding delay. Instead, they want to focus the status of top accounts and any trends. For these purposes, we use a Scorecard for Onboarding (called Launch below).

    6

    Several weeks ago, we started experimenting with a new Scorecard component that reflects onboarding risk as demonstrated by existing CTAs:

    • Green: No CTA exists – there is no risk in onboarding
    • Yellow: A CTA exists – the data indicates that onboarding is delayed, or the CSM has manually created a CTA.

    • Red: The CTA is Flagged – the Project Manager believes this is an issue that warrants greater attention or cross-functional collaboration.

    In this way, we’re incorporating into our Scorecard both an objective perspective on whether onboarding is at risk and the Project Manager’s subjective assessment about the degree of the risk. That way, executives have a highly accurate picture of what’s going on in Onboarding.

    How to Get Help

    A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the importance of hiring a Customer Success Operations lead to roll out processes like these. You can explore that topic more here.

    If you have questions about how to implement your own Onboarding Management process, feel free to reach out to your Gainsight CSM or to Allison at apickens@gainsight.com. You can also follow Allison’s blog posts on Twitter at @PickensAllison.

    • July 20, 2015
    • Allison Pickens
    • No Comments
    • Gainsight on Gainsight, _Customer Success

    How Customer Success Teams Can Drive Cross-Functional Coordination

    Allison Pickens is VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at Gainsight

    At the Chief Customer Officer Summit that we hosted several months ago, one of the group exercises was to imagine an ideal model for customer success, ignoring all practical constraints (and, of course, demonstrating the model through some kind of theatrical performance, in the spirit of Gainsight’s value of childlike joy). 

    My group chose to depict the Customer – linking arms with the CS department – as the sun at the center of a solar system, with all other departments at the company revolving around the two.  Besides generating a lot of laughs, the model showcased the idea that the voice of the customer, as broadcast by the CS department, should help guide the activities of other departments. 

    This Customer-centric (or CS-centric) model may be a far-off dream for many CS teams.  In every case, though, to fulfill their mandate, Customer Success teams need the help of other departments to drive customer health.  As one example, the Support team’s successful resolution of cases is critical for the CS team to achieve its own adoption and NPS goals.

    Strong cross-functional coordination in resolving each type of customer challenge requires departments to align on 2 things:

    1. Division of labor
    2. Process for overcoming that challenge

    Here’s how we tackle those 2 things at Gainsight:

    1. Division of Labor

    We designed a RACI framework to determine roles and responsibilities across functions, for different types of customer challenges that arise. RACI stands for:

    “Responsible”: you do work to overcome the customer challenge

    “Accountable”: your neck is on the line for resolving the customer challenge

    “Consulted”: your opinion on how to resolve the challenge must be solicited

    “Informed”: you’re kept in the loop about the resolution

    We can’t take credit for coming up with the RACI framework, but we’re definitely benefitting from implementing it at Gainsight.  We’re working toward the following RACI. In the chart, each column indicates a particular type of challenge; each row shows the role of the given department in resolving that challenge.

    Screen Shot 2015-07-12 at 2.38.25 PM

    (Note: As Gainsight grows, we’ll list additional departments on this chart, including a Renewals & Expansion team and an Education/Training team.)

    This chart reflects the fact that Customer Success is Accountable for downstream challenges (driving adoption and NPS) that rely on the successful upstream contributions of other departments.  In general, whenever a department is Accountable, it needs to have an outlet for providing feedback to other contributing (Responsible) departments.  That’s why Customer Success is listed as Consulted for many challenges that the other departments are Accountable for resolving. 

    In Customer Success, we need a process to ensure that we’re Consulted (or at least Informed) about contributions made by other departments to the goals of customer adoption and NPS.  Let’s turn to that process now.

    2. Process for Overcoming the Challenge

    For each of these customer challenges, we open a Call to Action (CTA) in Gainsight’s Cockpit to reflect the Risk.  In most cases, these CTAs are automatically triggered when a risk threshold is met.  The CSM can then exercise his/her judgment to decide whether to “flag” the CTA to the contributing department (using the Flag icon on the left-hand side of the CTA). 

    As an example, I’ll describe our process for resolving the above challenge of “Resolving technical cases in a timely, effective way.” 

    1. We’ve configured a rule that automatically triggers a Support Risk CTA when a support case is marked high priority, has been outstanding for a certain amount of time, or is one of several other support cases.
    2. The CSM reviews the CTA to decide whether s/he wants to discuss it further with the Support team, either to escalate the risk as particularly important or to offer a perspective on how to resolve it; if so, the CSM flags the CTA. 
    3. Then, during our weekly 30-minute Support Risk meeting between the Support team and those CSMs that have Flagged Support Risk CTAs, we discuss the status and path to resolution of each one.

    This process ensures that the CSM fulfills his/her role of being Consulted during the resolution of this type of customer challenge.

    Screen Shot 2015-07-12 at 2.14.17 PM

    Like the Support team in this example, each department is Accountable for Flagged CTAs related to their domain.  Every Monday during our Executive Team meeting, we review new Flagged CTAs and Flagged CTAs that are overdue, by department, for customers with a certain minimum ARR threshold.

    Screen Shot 2015-07-12 at 2.19.07 PM

    In this way, Cockpit has become our solution for managing cross-functional processes.

    If you have questions about how to implement a RACI framework and associated processes, feel free to reach out to me at apickens@gainsight.com.  You can also follow my blog posts on Twitter at @PickensAllison.

    • July 13, 2015
    • Allison Pickens
    • Best Practices, _Customer Success

    How Gainsight uses Scorecards and Calls to Action

    Allison Pickens is VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at Gainsight

    Note to Gainsight Customers: This post contains links to Vault Assets you can import directly into Gainsight.

    We’re excited to unveil the latest innovation from our Customer Success incubator at Gainsight: a new framework for addressing risk, using a combination of Scorecards and Calls to Action. If you missed my talk at PulseCheck, or if you want to hear the more detailed version, you can read this post to get up to speed.

    We had 4 objectives in mind when designing our Risk Management framework:

    1. Address early warning signs
    2. Incorporate the CSM’s judgment into the assessment of the risk level
    3. Establish a common view of risks across levels of the organization
    4. Hold other departments accountable for addressing risks
    1. Address early warning signs

    What are the key signals that a customer is at risk? We’ve identified 8 categories:

    1 - Risk Management

    We created CTAs for each of these risk areas, to help the CSM know when s/he should get involved. In most cases, the CTAs are automated according to the definitions above. In others, the CTAs are created manually by the CSM.

    Note that some of these risk areas are “owned” by Customer Success; others are owned by other departments. I’ll come back to that distinction later in this post.

    1. Incorporate the CSM’s judgment in assessment of the risk level

    Even after we invested a lot of thought into which CTAs to build, sometimes the CSM wouldn’t find a particular CTA to be super important. Maybe the CSM could handle the issue without escalating it, or s/he felt that no action was needed.

    We decided that in those cases, the CSM should do one of two things:

    • Resolve the issue independently and then close out the CTA, or
    • Mark the CTA as “Closed – No Action,” indicating that the CTA wasn’t relevant enough to take action.

    Our Customer Success Operations lead then tracks the trend of CTAs marked “Closed – No Action,” to figure out whether to adjust CTA thresholds to make them more relevant.

    At other times, a CTA would be highly relevant and important, so that the CSM would want to highlight the issue to his/her manager or another department. In those situations, the CSM “flags” the CTA, by clicking on the Flag icon on the left-hand side of the CTA so that it turns orange. You can see the difference between flagged and non-flagged CTAs here:

    2 - Risk Management

    A Flagged CTA tells me and the CSM’s direct manager that this is an issue that warrants more time and resources. Flagging also influences our Scorecards, as I’ll explain below.

    1. Establish a common view of risks across levels of the organization

    Once we decided on our key risk categories and the CSMs began to follow up on those risks, I needed a bird’s eye view of risk in our customer base.

    • What are the most important outstanding risks this week?
    • Which risks does each of our top accounts have?
    • Which risk category has the largest volume of issues?

    I also needed a way to:

    • Communicate these risks to our CEO and the rest of our leadership team
    • Make sure that our CSMs and team managers agreed with the list of accounts that I highlighted as at-risk

    With these goals in mind, we created a Scorecard component for each of the 8 risk categories. We then linked those Scorecards to Risk CTAs – that is, the existence of a particular Risk CTA influences the color of the corresponding Scorecard. Here’s the structure of each Scorecard:

    3 - Risk Management

    To illustrate the value of this framework, let’s take Support Risk as an example. Our Support Risk CTA triggers when there is one of 3 situations:

    1. High volume of support tickets
    2. A ticket has been open for a long period of time
    3. The priority level is High or Urgent

    The color of our associated Support Risk Scorecard changes automatically in response to these CTAs:

    • Green: This is the default color. If there’s no Support Risk CTA, then the Support Risk Scorecard is green.
    • Yellow: A Support Risk CTA exists.
    • Red: The CSM has “flagged” the Support Risk CTA, indicating a belief that the issue requires greater attention.

    There are enormous advantages to this methodology:

    • Whenever I see that a scorecard is red, I can feel reassured that someone is working on the underlying issue.
    • Conversely, whenever a CSM is taking action, I am aware of it and can help out as needed.

    We now have a single source of truth for which customers are at risk.

    To make this visual, the Scorecards that we review at our weekly leadership team meeting…

    4 - Risk Management

    … reflect the same Flagged CTAs that are in Cockpit:

    5 - Risk Management

    Now, let’s move on to the 4th objective of the risk framework.

    1. Your CEO is holding you accountable for a situation that isn’t in your hands

    A few weeks ago, I wrote about the RACI framework that we implemented to ensure that each department was accountable for surmounting customer challenges that fell under their domain. We’ve embedded that RACI framework into our process for using Gainsight.

    You might have noticed in the image of the 8 scorecard categories (copied again below) that a member of our executive team owns each category. For example, our VP of Sales makes sure that our account executives are selling to customers that are ready for Gainsight; our VP of Engineering oversees his team’s efforts to resolve any bugs that may arise.

    1 - Risk Management

    You’ll see that Customer Success independently owns only 3 of these categories:

    • Company Risk: We can’t fully control what happens at our customers (e.g. a re-org), but we can take actions that mitigate the resultant risk to adoption and the renewal. For example, we can build relationships with any new executive sponsors and recommend necessary adaptations to the company’s implementation of Gainsight.
    • Sentiment Risk: We follow up on NPS ratings and track any other indications of a customer’s “emotional state,” or inclination to renew.
    • Habits Risk: Naturally, we want the customer to adopt the product in a way that (a) helps them derive maximal value and (b) is sticky. A CTA triggers when the customer isn’t using the product as we would hope.

    At our weekly leadership team meeting, each executive discusses the risks in their category and the next steps.


    *** Note that our Risk Management process may not be suitable for companies that are Tech Touch only, since they will not be using CTAs. In addition, this process may not be optimal for CSM teams that are very high-touch (e.g. with 5 accounts per CSM) and therefore don’t substantially benefit from using CTAs. But, if you have a classic team with CSMs who are managing a moderate number of accounts, this Risk Management process can be impactful


    If you have questions about how to implement your own Risk Management process, feel free to reach out to your CSM or to Allison at apickens@gainsight.com. We’ll also be publishing more content about this topic in the future.

    You can follow Allison’s blog posts on Twitter at @PickensAllison.

    Vault Assets mentioned in this post

    (for Gainsight customers only)

    Here are ready-to-use versions of what you’ve seen in this post:

    • Set Score 1: Set Greens for all Measures
    • Readiness Risk: Set Score 2: Set Yellows & Reds based on CTAs
    • Company Risk: Set Score 2: Set Yellows & Reds based on CTAs
    • Sentiment Risk: Set Score 2: Set Yellows & Reds based on CTAs
    • Product Risk: Set Score 2: Set Yellows & Reds based on CTAs
    • Implementation Risk: Set Score 2: Set Yellows & Reds based on CTAs
    • Bugs Risk: Set Score 2: Set Yellows & Reds based on CTAs
    • Support Risk: Set Score 2: Set Yellows based on CTAs
    • Support Risk: Set Score 3: Set Reds based on Flagged CTAs
    • July 3, 2015
    • Allison Pickens
    • Gainsight on Gainsight, _Customer Success

    Managing Risks in Customer Relationships

    Allison introduced this framework for managing risks at Gainsight’s annual Pulse conference earlier this month. We’re making it available to the community for the first time in this blog post.

    In the past, we introduced the concept of Code Red as an approach to tackling risk in our customer base. In our original Code Red process, CSMs identified customers that would not renew if theoretically their renewal date were 1 month from now. This process allowed our team to escalate risky customers to our leadership team and coordinate across executive sponsors, Support, Services, Product, and Engineering to get these customers back on track.

    The Code Red process worked well for us when we were a smaller company. As we’ve grown larger, we’ve found a need to build on this process to achieve 2 goals:

    1. Segment risky customers based on the cause of the risk. Segmentation allows us to create a more targeted playbook to resolve a given risk, and also to identify any systemic reasons why certain risks tend to occur in our business.
    2. Flag risks earlier, even before the relationship gets to a point at which the customer wouldn’t renew if their renewal date were 1 month away. Intervening early allows us to avoid firefighting.

    Our new framework for managing risks uses an analogy between risks in one’s personal life and risks in customer relationships. Many of you saw me present this framework last week at our annual conference, Pulse, and asked if I could share it in written form. Here it is.

    Say you’ve got a chart with Personal Well-Being on the y-axis and Time on the x-axis. Our goal is to understand how personal well-being changes over time as issues in one’s life arise. There are 5 risks in life that people need to mitigate.

    The first risk that a person encounters is that they’re born into a sub-optimal Context. At birth, one inherits a certain family history, has a certain degree of access to healthy food, and is exposed to certain behavioral risks. This context can influence a person’s potential to be happy and healthy in life.

    risk1

    Your context can change later, too: you could start smoking, or move to Antarctica, causing your potential for happiness to shift downward.

    risk2

    After your birth, your parents do their best to guide you through childhood, but even, so you might experience a second risk called Failure to Launch: after graduation, you move back into your parent’s basement; you stay unemployed for much of your twenties.

    risk3

    If you succeed in launching, you can achieve certain milestones, perhaps with the help of a Life Coach, mentor, or therapist.

    risk4

    Still, certain Crises may materialize. You might break an arm, but you can go to the ER and they’ll fix you up quickly after some momentary pain. You might experience a tough break-up, but you can rebound with the help of your support network.

    risk5

    Furthermore, you may start adopting Bad Habits: you stop exercising; you watch too much Netflix. You may also become Pessimistic: you become that downer that none of your friends want to hang out with. But supportive friends and family members will help you reinstate good habits and restore your faith in life.

    risk6

    As it turns out, you’ll encounter the same 5 risks in your relationships with your customers.
    risk7

    1. Customer Fit Risk: From the very beginning, a customer may not be a good fit for your product. (Did you sell to the wrong customer?) Even if the customer is a good fit to start, they may depart from that status over time. For example, if one of your qualification criteria is that the company has a strong executive sponsor, and that sponsor leaves the company, the customer may no longer be able to support your product.
    2. Launch Risk: Customers may struggle during the onboarding process and never implement your product.
    3. Crisis Risk: Customers may encounter technical issues and spend significant time working with your Support team.
    4. Bad Habits Risk: Customers may adopt “bad habits” in using your product: they may not maintain it or use it to the fullest extent.
    5. Pessimism Risk: Customers may lose faith in your product. They may exhibit this pessimism by canceling meetings, not responding to your emails, or delivering a detractor NPS score.

    In identifying these risks as soon as they arise, CSMs can ensure that customers stay on a healthy track. In this sense, the CSM takes on the role of the life coach or mentor in one’s personal life. When a customer struggles during implementation, your Onboarding team can escalate to the CSM to align with the executive sponsor.

    When your Support team is flooded with tickets from a particular customer, your CSM can align with the customer on their underlying business need and advise the Support team on how to resolve the issues. If a customer doesn’t have risks 1-3 but does exhibit “bad habits”, that’s a terrific opportunity for a CSM to help the customer use the product as designed to drive maximal ROI.

    And if the customer is pessimistic — perhaps as a result of experiencing one or more of the other 4 problems – your CSM can focus on nurturing the relationship. High-performing CSM teams identify those critical moments when intervention can make a big difference to the customer.

    Of course, you can use Gainsight to track these 5 risks and mitigate them. We’ll explain how we do that in a later post.

    • May 28, 2015
    • Allison Pickens
    • _Customer Success

    Knowledge Transfer Process in Customer Success Management

    Customer success managers and leaders: Do any of these statements sound familiar to you?

    1. “The customer was upset during our kick-off because we asked them the same questions that the sales team had asked them before close.”
    2. “I’m not sure what Services actually implemented for this customer.”
    3. “No one scheduled the kick-off meeting yet; I thought that Sales or Services was responsible for that.”
    4. “This customer isn’t a great fit for us. There’s not a lot that I can do to help them.”

    If these sound familiar, you have an opportunity to improve the way that you work cross-functionally. You’re not alone; these are common problems for customer success teams, especially within fast-growing companies, in which organizational structures change frequently.

    The good news is that Customer Success is uniquely positioned within a company to drive cross-functional coordination. We’re accountable for customer retention and up-sell, which gives us a mandate to advocate for cross-functional processes that support the customer’s well-being.

    You’ll need 3 things to successfully work cross-functionally:

    1. People: Team members who design smart processes. At early stage companies, the leader of the CSM team can fill this role. As you scale, you’ll want to hire an operations manager.
    2. Process: Best practices for those processes. It’s important to adapt processes to reflect what’s unique about your market and product, but we all can certainly learn from what worked for other companies.
    3. Technology: A customer success solution like Gainsight to hold people accountable for executing those processes.

    I’ll be publishing a series of blog posts on how we’ve designed cross-functional processes, to the customer’s benefit. This post will focus on Knowledge Transfer: a process for ensuring that the sales team relays the information they gather from the customer to your post-sales teams. The goal is to make sure that statement #1 above doesn’t become a refrain on your customer success team: “The customer was upset during our kick-off because we asked them the same questions that the sales team had asked them before close.”

    We hired an exceptional team member, Barr Moses, to spearhead cross-functional initiatives between Customer Success, Sales, and Services. Barr designed a Knowledge Transfer process that covered the following areas:

    1. Customer Type

    At Gainsight, we have 3 models for customer engagement: Express, Custom, and New Use Cases. Express customers are the most typical: they’re eligible for our accelerated implementation process. Custom customers want an implementation process that’s catered to their unique needs. New Use Cases customers are looking to partner with us to craft what customer success processes and software should look like in their industry. It’s important for our Customer Success and Services teams to know which category each new customer falls into. We’ve trained the sales team on how to assign customers to the right category.

    2. Use Case

    These questions help us make sure that we meet the customer’s definition of success in post-sales:

    • What are the customers’ business objectives?
    • Which Gainsight features are they most interested in?
    • Which features are they not at all interested in?
    • What are any challenges we may face in making this customer successful?

    In this section, we also ask about the customer’s Customer Success engagement model, given that this affects how they’ll use our software. If you’re a marketing automation company, you might ask questions about your customer’s marketing strategy.

    3. Implementation Process

    This section benefits our Services team.

    • What type of implementation package did the customer buy?
    • What’s the timing of implementation?
    • What CRM, Support, Survey, BI, Financial, Marketing Automation, and other systems do they use?

    4. Personas

    We work with several different types of people at our customers:

    • Executive Decision-Maker: The person who determines whether to renew Gainsight.
    • Adoption Champion: The person who has the motivation to use Gainsight for their team.
    • Gainsight Administrator: The person who configures rules and dashboards within Gainsight.

    It’s important for Sales to identify these people immediately after contract signature, so that we can cater our 1:many programs to their different roles, and so that our Customer Success and Services teams know who to reach out to for different parts of our onboarding process.

    We also want to know, does Gainsight have any pre-existing relationships with this customer (e.g. a common board member)?

    We included these questions as required fields in a section of the Salesforce.com Opportunity page, so that the account executive fills them out before s/he moves the deal to Closed/Won phase. The fields then populate into Gainsight’s Customer360 page. That way, we have the information at our fingertips right after the contract is signed.

    If the account executive answers some of the questions in a particular way, we know that the customer will be higher-risk to begin with. These answers trigger a lower initial health score for the customer within Gainsight. I’ll return to the subject of qualification criteria in a later blog post, since it’s critical to sell to the right customers.

    Our sales team is fully on board with implementing this Knowledge Transfer process. It’s more convenient for them to fill out this form than answer our one-off questions after close. In addition, we structured the fields in Salesforce.com essentially as a 5-7 minute survey, with drop-down menus and multi-select options, so that the questions are easy to answer.Thanks to our collaboration with the sales team, we’re looking forward to getting our new Q1 customers off to a great start in May.

    If you have questions about how to set up your own Knowledge Transfer process, contact your Gainsight CSM or me at apickens@gainsight.com.

    • April 22, 2015
    • Allison Pickens
    • No Comments
    • Gainsight on Gainsight, _Customer Success

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