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,
How We Segmented Our Company – Not Just Customers
This post was co-authored by Nick Mehta and Allison Pickens. 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
Why Customer Success Matters Just as Much as Sales
Understanding the importance of the professional enablement of their sales teams, many forward-thinking companies invest heavily in helping their salespeople develop more skills and talents on a regular basis. When sales teams become more effective, the ROI is quite clear. Revenue ticks up. But enablement doesn’t need to be limited to sales. It turns out
How We Stopped Using Spreadsheets to Track Important Company Metrics
Noha Khan is on the Business Operations team at Gainsight Note, this use case is dependent on custom fields added to the Call to Action object. If there’s one task that cannot be avoided in an Operations role, it’s recording key KPIs and metrics. And with good reason! Having quantifiable means to track progress and
The 5 value propositions of Pulse 2017
Pulse. To us here at Gainsight, it’s the most important thing we do all year. We spend about 11 months of the year planning this conference and one white-knuckle week in May pulling it off. It’s intense, but intensely satisfying. We believe in the intrinsic value of the event and the community we build through
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
Customer Success at Your Company’s 2017 Sales Kickoff
As you approach the end of your company’s year, if you’re like me, you’re probably juggling three things in parallel: Closing out your (hopefully big) Q4 Planning for next year Mixing in some holiday shopping and cheesy holiday music when you can Somewhere in there, most companies are also simultaneously planning their next year’s “sales
5 Lessons from Failed Customer Success Programs
Customer Success Management (CSM) is hot. But it’s also new. So with the tremendous growth in the CSM world come some organizations that have failed in their quest toward success. While most companies are radically increasing investment in CSM, a few have pulled back. As the old saying goes, “last in, first out;” since many
Is A Company the Ship of Theseus?
My first big company job back in 2002 taught me a lot. I learned all about the nuances of the (at the time) 5,000-person business I had joined. I learned the people and the products. I learned how to get stuff done. And I witnessed echoes of the history of the company—stories about the previous
11 Considerations for an Enterprise Customer Success Management Pilot
As B2B companies innovate in their business models, offering flexible and customer-aligned delivery models like subscription, cloud, pay-as-you-go, and outcomes-based pricing, they are realizing the increasing power that their clients have—and the increasing ROI from investing in retaining and growing their customer base. At the same time, these B2B companies have implemented a myriad of