1. An incredible agenda featuring Functional Micro-conferences If you haven’t seen the agenda yet, you need to. We’re kicking it off on Monday, May 9 with Customer Success University (CSU) Live! Certification Day and a big Welcome Party in the evening. Then we kick into full gear on Tuesday by diving into our main theme:

This blog is the third of five based on anonymized discussions from CCO Summit 2016. Read the second here. Hiring a new CSM can feel a lot like hiring Batman. And not the dark, brooding anti-hero with the scary Batman-voice, but the 1960s Batman. The one with Robin and Commissioner Gordon and the Batphone and

This blog is the second of five based on anonymized discussions from CCO Summit 2016. Read the first here. One of the biggest factors that has led to the explosion of the Customer Success movement is the growing recognition that there’s no one-size-fits all strategy for meeting your customers’ needs. As you get to know

Tom is a highly-motivated and innovative success leader, managing the Adobe eSign Services’ International Client Success team in EMEA and APAC. Tom’s passion is seeking and deploying the next innovative technologies that will improve the way people live, communicate and execute business. In his downtime he enjoys running, barbecuing, and wine tasting. When Adobe first

This blog is the first of five based on anonymized discussions from CCO Summit 2016. A SWOT analysis is a framework that companies and business school professors have been conducting since as far back as the 1950s. If you’re interested in the history of SWOT, Tim Friesner posted a pretty comprehensive investigation of the muddled,

  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

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

Many of the tools and processes that Customer Success Managers (CSMs) use in their daily jobs are there to gain efficiency –and are designed to help them serve a growing number of customers in perpetually less time. Often this can mean there’s less one-on-one time with customers in an effort to address all the demands

“With the shift to a SaaS model, the connection between your customer’s success and YOUR success is much more direct and felt much more quickly.” – Ken Lownie, Ken Lownie Consulting Partners. Like at the beginning of every relationship, your customers are very needy. They’re easily confused, unsure about the future and generally looking to

We have been debating this a lot internally here at Gainsight. In short, we were trying to figure out if the cost of a Customer Success Team should be accounted for as Cost of Goods Sold or Sales and Marketing. You would think there would be a single and very straightforward answer, but the more