I’ll admit it. I’m kind of obsessed. In my brain, I’m always thinking about our clients. How are they doing? Are we delivering on our promise to them? Has their experience been positive? Do we have the right relationships?
I guess since I am the CEO of THE Customer Success company, that focus makes sense.
But knowing 1000s of CEOs, I know many of you are the same. You genuinely want your company to do a good job. You see the power of positive advocacy. You get the importance of retention. You understand the value of expansion. And, if you’re like me, you’re always wondering if your company is delivering value.
Here are my five secrets to keeping it all together.
1. Track Our Advocates
I don’t know about your company, but a HUGE part of our sales at Gainsight is related to people at clients taking on new roles at prospects and bringing us along. I take our client relationships seriously and value the personal connections I’ve built. Using our Sponsor Tracking in Gainsight, I get alerted about our clients changing jobs and then congratulate them on their new position.
Inevitably, this leads to a response like this:
2. Pay Attention to Client News
In a similar vein, we want to stay close to our customers’ businesses. Are they growing? What new products are they launching? Did they just raise money? Did they get acquired?
Gainsight Company Intelligence alerts me to news about our customers. I use these triggers as an opportunity to congratulate our clients and often re-engage with them.
This frequently leads to new opportunities to drive value for our customers and, in some cases, expand.
3. Stakeholder Alignment
“Executive alignment is critical to client retention.”
—Every business ever
“We have no process to do that.”
—Most businesses
Since our clients’ executives change, and their strategies also evolve, we need to stay close to stay relevant. We have a defined executive sponsor for every customer at Gainsight and a clearly-defined peer exec at the client.
On a pre-defined cadence (e.g., every 90 days), depending on the customer segment, we get alerts telling us to reach out to the client exec.
I then reach out dutifully and capture my notes in Gainsight Timeline, so we can then mark our “Engagement” health score as green.
4. Scorecards
Speaking of health scores, we, of course, use Gainsight Scorecards. Every Monday in our Weekly Business Review, we discuss a chart of our top 15 clients and their health by area—Deployment, Engagement, Adoption, ROI, Customer Experience, and other factors.
5. Global Timeline
Finally, on Sunday nights, as I get ready for the week, I like to catch up on the “news” from the last week. Gainsight Timeline is what our entire company uses to capture notes about client interactions. As I navigate to “Global Timeline,” I see a Twitter-like feed of all of our clients’ notes. I scan the updates, looking for risks, clients that I know, and revealing insights.
I’ll often learn about new trends (e.g., feature requests) and opportunities to help. I can then @mention the team and volunteer, for example, to reach out to the client CEO.
If you get a random, “perfectly-timed” email from me as a client exec, now you know the method to our madness!
