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

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

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

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

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

You might not know this, but People.ai isn’t my first company. I actually founded a previous company, Semantria, which built the world’s first massively scalable sentiment analysis cloud service. Semantria was successfully sold to text analytics company Lexalytics in 2014. While I’m proud of what my team and I were able to accomplish at Semantria,

I am excited to share the details of some new features that help capture rich customer context to build a deeper understanding of your customers: Customer360 Timeline: Log and view customer activities on a timeline to capture and consume rich, contextual information C360 Layouts: Create custom C360 layout views for customer stage and also tailor

Allison Pickens is VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at Gainsight. Will Robins is on the Business Operations team at Gainsight. Generating advocacy is one of the most important parts of the CSM role. Why is that? Advocacy reduces your cost of sales. Think about it: when your happy customers spread the word about

If you have a pulse, you’ve heard this question: If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound? That’s not the question I’m here to answer, but here are some that might similarly give you reason to pause and reflect: Does a SaaS

Allison Pickens is VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at Gainsight. Special thanks to Gaurav Kotak, Will Robins, and Elena Painter for contributing to this blog post. Customer Success leaders typically want to collaborate more effectively with other departments in their organization. Even though CS departments are accountable for the renewal rate in many