I joined Gainsight over a year ago (wow, time flies). From the get-go, I was super impressed with what the product was able to, especially when the “old way” of doing things was all too familiar. In every company that I’ve ever been a part of, account management teams had to manually track down updates
How to Determine the Best Customer Success Manager Ratio
How to Determine the Best Customer Success Manager (CSM) Ratio When planning a Customer Success Management organization, or just trying to prepare your budget for the coming fiscal year, the question that always comes up is “What is the ideal ratio of Customer Success Managers (CSMs) to the number of customers? To the amount of
Customer Success: Who Owns Upsell and Renewal?
Customer Success: Who Owns Upsell and Renewal? When it comes to Customer Success Management, the question of “Who owns Upsell and Renewal?” comes up quite frequently. That question is generally followed closely by “how do you structure CSM compensation if they handle upsells and renewals?” Well, the short answer is it depends. The longer answer
The Secret of Low-Touch Customer Success
The Secret of Low-Touch Customer Success One of the things that the SaaS model almost always leads to is a long tail of low-revenue, generally self-service customers. You often see the term low-value used, only to indicate the relative financial value of those customers, but words are important, and how would your customers feel if
How to Optimize your Board, Staff, and Customer Success Meetings
How to Optimize your Board, Staff, and Customer Success Meetings If you’re a VP in charge of retention or renewals/upsell, there are several meetings on your monthly calendar that I know you’d LOVE to make more productive. What if I told you that I have a few tricks that can make every single one of
Why Bessemer Invested $25M in Gainsight
On behalf of the entire cloud team at Bessemer Venture Partners, we are thrilled to be joining the team at Gainsight as investors! Since the very first publication of Bessemer’s 10 Laws of Cloud Computing, one thing has been very clear and we say it repeatedly: “the single biggest driver of long term profitability for
Customer Success Priorities: Customers, Experience, Product
Customer Success Priorities: Customers, Experience, Product We covered the 7 Laws of Customer Success, but to give a little bit of context to those laws, here are the three key priorities for Customer Success Management (CSM) organizations. This list is to help you understand the higher order issues at play and the highest and best
The 7 Laws of Customer Success
The laws of physics are presumed to be immutable; bodies at rest tend to stay at rest and all that. Well, the laws of Customer Success may not rise to the level of immutability, but if you take them for what they are – directionally accurate and, in many cases, irrefutable – these laws will
Customer Health Scoring: Misunderstandings, Myths, & Truths
Customer Health Scoring: Misunderstandings, Myths, & Truths Customer health scoring is such a hot topic (one we’ve covered several times before), and fundamental to success in our recurring revenue and subscription world, that I thought I’d try to shine some light into the dark corners of confusion I’ve been seeing and hearing on this subject
The Power of the Quarterly Business Review – QBR
UPDATE: What your client’s executive team thinks of your product or service carries a lot of weight, and QBRs are the perfect time to show exactly how big of an impact you’ve had on their business. Learn how to get your client’s executive team at your next QBR in this blog post, 5 Ways to