Sitecore Conquers the Cloud with Help from Gainsight

When the digital experience software company Sitecore launched a subscription SaaS offering, the move to offering a subscription model meant transitioning from a reactive, customer support role to taking the lead in terms of generating revenue for the business. To meet this challenge, they leveraged Gainsight to build a data-driven, automated strategy that delivered customer engagements at scale, putting the new subscription business model on a solid footing.

Sitecore is a global leader in end-to-end digital experiences. Unifying data, content, commerce, and experiences, their platform has been empowering brands since 2001. Like many legacy technology companies, Sitecore built their business with on-premise software. As the world has shifted to the cloud, they are now offering a subscription-based, recurring revenue business.

For Sitecore’s Customer Success team, the shift in business model necessitated a new approach focused on driving renewals and reducing churn. They faced multiple challenges, including:

• Managing a customer base with differing levels of adoption, from all on-prem to all-SaaS, and everything in between
• Leading a company-wide culture shift and becoming accountable for revenue generation
• Navigating uncharted territory, without playbooks or processes in place

They started with a data-based approach that provided the right insights to segment their customers effectively. Gainsight helped them identify, track, and understand leading and lagging indicators of their customers’ health. This meant shifting their focus to metrics like annual recurring revenue (ARR) and churn, as well as gathering sentiment from customers through NPS and transactional surveys.

With the right data in place, they then used Gainsight to automate previously ad hoc and time-consuming processes to deliver on their communication strategy.

“We had been doing a very manual process for some time. We used Gainsight to build a bespoke communication model. Now we’re tailoring communications to our customers, so it’s not a program manager sending out mass emails anymore, it’s actually Gainsight facilitating the effort.”
– Adnan Rahman, Senior Director, Customer Success at Sitecore

Automation across the customer journey has allowed Sitecore to implement repeatable and reliable processes

“Too often, customer success depends on human heroics, which is not sustainable. Automated, standardized processes powered by Gainsight have made it much easier to replicate our successes.”
– Adnan Rahman, Senior Director at Customer Success at Sitecore

The improvement in data quality with Gainsight means that Sitecore is now able to understand use cases across their customer base.

The move to SaaS has helped the company renew its commitment to putting customers first, which is one of Sitecore’s customer success values.

“Delivering great customer experiences starts with understanding what customers expect from a cloud solution provider.”
– Adnan Rahman, Senior Director, Customer Success Americas at Sitecore

With Gainsight at Sitecore’s side, they could not only make a smooth transition from on-prem to SaaS, but standardize processes from the start so as their team grew they had the right tools in place to scale effectively. The result has been a robust team of diverse, flexible, seasoned CSMs who are ready to pivot as necessary to meet the challenges of tomorrow.