Companies that support open source software face stiff competition, with constant pressure on customer retention. As a result, Customer Success is a critical investment for open source players. In this post, I shed light on why Customer Success is important to open source companies and offer five key actions companies should take when putting this

Does your customer organization often feel they have little insight into the customer’s experience during onboarding or a services engagement? Do you need a better method to keep sales, services and customer success aligned throughout the customer’s lifecycle? Well despair no further! Maintaining that transparency and alignment across your teams to ensure your customer has

(The reports below are real but the data is blurred to protect the innocent…) If you haven’t heard yet, we recently raised $50 trillionbillionmillion in Series D funding led by Insight Venture Partners (there is a great article from Forbes about it here). And as I mentioned previously, the biggest story from the financing round

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

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

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

Gainsight (and any good Customer Success tool) claims to help you end your days of customer fire-drills and replace them with sunny days of skipping through fields of daisies hand-in-hand with your customer. That may be slightly hyperbolic but the idea is that Gainsight aims to help you shift from reactive customer management to proactive.

Customer Success Managers (CSMs) and Account Managers need to know everything about their customers that there is to know– in real time and all the time. With the constant flow of new customer data to and from different systems, it is a sisyphean task to keep rolling that data management rock up the hill (so

Tracey Bozzelli is the Director of Competitive initiatives at Blackbaud. Blackbaud, a $2 billion software and service organization, is a world-class supplier of software tools, financial services and fund raising/gift management consulting expertise to non-profit organizations around the world. Blackbaud has an active customer success program. In late October 2015, Tracey participated in a conversation

You are a sales rep working for an innovative organization with a great product. You’ve just been involved in pitching an opportunity to new prospect. They turned you down in favor of a competitor’s product. Your sales manager asks you what went on – why did we not win this business? You answer to the