Over a decade and a half spent serving in account management and marketing strategy roles at b2b ad agencies, I’ve learned the art of successful expectation management. For customer success practitioners, knowing how to set customer expectations post- purchase, and then throughout implementation has become a standard practice. But, it’s naive to think that those

Last week, we announced our all-new integration with leading customer success management solution Gainsight to create a 360 degree of the customer engagement lifecycle. As a user of Clarizen, Gainsight has also integrated Clarizen into its services group, who owns onboarding and any custom/additional projects, as well as its customer success strategy. The integration has

Allison Pickens is VP of Customer Success and Business Operations at Gainsight Note to Gainsight Customers: This post contains links to Vault Assets you can import directly into Gainsight. If you’re living in Excel and PowerPoint, then preparing for board meetings takes time. That’s time that you’d probably prefer to spend on actually driving toward

Companies that support open source software face stiff competition, with constant pressure on customer retention. As a result, Customer Success is a critical investment for open source players. In this post, I shed light on why Customer Success is important to open source companies and offer five key actions companies should take when putting this

Does your customer organization often feel they have little insight into the customer’s experience during onboarding or a services engagement? Do you need a better method to keep sales, services and customer success aligned throughout the customer’s lifecycle? Well despair no further! Maintaining that transparency and alignment across your teams to ensure your customer has

(The reports below are real but the data is blurred to protect the innocent…) If you haven’t heard yet, we recently raised $50 trillionbillionmillion in Series D funding led by Insight Venture Partners (there is a great article from Forbes about it here). And as I mentioned previously, the biggest story from the financing round

Note to Gainsight Customers: This post contains links to Vault Assets you can import directly into Gainsight. During our Pulse Europe conference, I moderated a dinner discussion among a group of 30 Gainsight customers. I kicked off the discussion with one question: “How would you define Customer Success?” One participant immediately responded, “That’s easy. Customer

Allison Pickens is VP of Customer Success & Business Operations at Gainsight Last week, I talked about how other departments can work more closely with Customer Success, to the benefit of the customer. Today, I’ll discuss how those departments themselves benefit from working more closely with the CS team. In other words – what’s in

Note to Gainsight Customers: This post contains links to Vault Assets you can import directly into Gainsight. How to manage renewals and expansion is one of the most hotly debated topics in the Customer Success industry. Here’s how we do it at Gainsight. Reporting Structure The CSM team has always owned renewals and upsell; we’ve

Gainsight (and any good Customer Success tool) claims to help you end your days of customer fire-drills and replace them with sunny days of skipping through fields of daisies hand-in-hand with your customer. That may be slightly hyperbolic but the idea is that Gainsight aims to help you shift from reactive customer management to proactive.