This blog is the first of five based on anonymized discussions from CCO Summit 2016. A SWOT analysis is a framework that companies and business school professors have been conducting since as far back as the 1950s. If you’re interested in the history of SWOT, Tim Friesner posted a pretty comprehensive investigation of the muddled,

  Allison Pickens is VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at Gainsight. The number-one question that keeps most VPs of Customer Success up at night is: “What’s the ROI of Customer Success?” This question is challenging to answer for two reasons: (1) Broad Accountability with Limited Influence CSM teams are typically held accountable for

Allison Pickens is VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at Gainsight. Thanks to Kelly DeHart (Director of Customer Success) and other team members for contributing to this blog post and creating some of the processes we’ll describe below. Note to Gainsight Customers: This post contains links to Vault Assets you can import directly into

Many of the tools and processes that Customer Success Managers (CSMs) use in their daily jobs are there to gain efficiency –and are designed to help them serve a growing number of customers in perpetually less time. Often this can mean there’s less one-on-one time with customers in an effort to address all the demands

“With the shift to a SaaS model, the connection between your customer’s success and YOUR success is much more direct and felt much more quickly.” – Ken Lownie, Ken Lownie Consulting Partners. Like at the beginning of every relationship, your customers are very needy. They’re easily confused, unsure about the future and generally looking to

We have been debating this a lot internally here at Gainsight. In short, we were trying to figure out if the cost of a Customer Success Team should be accounted for as Cost of Goods Sold or Sales and Marketing. You would think there would be a single and very straightforward answer, but the more

Henry Ford famously said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Ford’s sentiment highlights the risk of developing products based on what customers say, and the benefit of understanding why customers say what they say. In his case, people just wanted a faster way to get from point

Angela is the VP of Customer Success at SaaS vendor Reevoo in London. Prior to Reevoo she spent over 15 years at Oracle Corporation, most recently as a member of the senior management team within the EMEA Customer Success organisation. I am 90 days into my current role. The term ‘Customer Success’ is about 100

Last year, I started sending “Tip of the Day” emails to my team. Sometimes I sent a Tip when I noticed a smart tactic that one team member used, and wanted to make sure we replicated it across the team. Other times I noticed a mistake that shouldn’t be repeated. Sometimes I had an idea

A year ago, we undertook the challenge to reimagine our reporting and analytical capabilities. We realized that Gainsight has an abundant wealth of data across multiple dimensions of customer engagement (like usage, billing, survey, support and implementation) yet we did not have an analytical tool versatile enough to encourage interactive exploration and discovery. Having the