This is it. The big one. If you work in any post-sales or customer-facing role, you simply can’t afford to miss the definitive global networking and learning conference in Customer Success.
You don’t need another session trying to convince you Customer Success is worth the investment. You need hands-on networking, cutting-edge best practices, and the most recent data on trends, tactics, and forecasts.
Get more from your conference than a TED Talk. Our speakers are experienced, knowledgeable, and committed to bringing you engaging, informed perspectives you can’t get in a YouTube video.
This is a promise: there’s no other event on the planet where you’ll have the chance to network with more than 5,000 Customer Success professionals. We’ve got a plan to help you make lasting connections without being overwhelmed.
Take a look at the agenda below to see every speaker.
If you’re a Gainsight customer, you’re invited to our Customer Appreciation Day. Click here for more info.
Pulse Academy Live! is the premier Customer Success education event in the world, offering a multi-track, day-long immersive experience for CS professionals of all levels. Whether you’re new to Customer Success, have previously attended a Pulse Academy or CSU Live event, or are looking to advance your Gainsight product knowledge, we have refreshed and advanced content, workshops, and experts to help accelerate your career and the impact you will have on your business.
What to Expect
Full-Day, In-Person Program
This is essentially a conference-within-a-conference that will include a keynote, workshops, topic breakouts, ask-me-anything sessions, and opportunities to collaborate with like-minded peers. Led by Gainsight, this year’s curriculum and content are all-new, with fresh perspectives from some of the top experts from the industry. They’ll guide the day’s learning and share their wisdom, culminating with an exam and opportunity to earn Pulse Academy certification.
Distinct Educational Tracks
- Track 1: Customer Success Essentials
- Track 2: Advanced Customer Success 1
- Track 3: Gainsight Technical Enablement 2
1 Recommended for Pulse Academy alumni or those who’ve been in a CSM role for some time
2 Prerequisites: Admin 100 Series
Cost
$299 per person Includes lunch and access to Customer Success University CSM courses after the event.
We slashed prices nearly in half from last year, and doubled down on curriculum.
Bonus: Free Access to Customer Success University
All Pulse Academy Live! registrants will also receive access to Customer Success University after the event through the end of the year. This offer includes the entire Customer Success Manager track: CSM 101, CSM 201, and CSM 203 (an $897.00 value). Developed by top Customer Success experts, these online courses can be taken at your own pace and will provide you with additional knowledge to advance your career in Customer Success.
| Time | Title | Description |
| 7:30 AM | Registration Open & Light Breakfast | |
| 8:30 AM | PULSE ACADEMY KEYNOTE with Dan Steinman | |
| 9:15 AM | Customer Success: An Academic’s Perspective | In this short opening presentation, we will hear from Professor Deva Rangarajan, PhD, BE, Director, Center for Professional Selling, Ball State University - Miller College of Business, about why the attention-getting topic of customer success compelled him to dedicate time to understand and research this exciting and rapidly evolving methodology. |
| 9:30 AM | Why CS Matters | We’ve entered a new age. Customers have new expectations and represent new opportunities for growth. In this session, you’ll discover how Customer Success plays a critical role in maximizing the value of your customer base. |
| 10:00 AM | Customer Success Fundamentals | What is Customer Success? What isn’t it? And what does a CSM do, exactly? Learn the answers to these questions and much, much more in Customer Success Fundamentals. This session will provide you with a solid understanding of the function of Customer Success and the frameworks involved in delivering the outcomes your customers truly desire. |
| 10:15 AM | Customer Success Metrics | The most impactful Customer Success teams are metrics-driven. They know which numbers matter and how to calculate them—and after this session, you will too. Get ready to deep-dive into the metrics commonly used by best-in-class Customer Success orgs and gain a deep understanding of terms like churn, retention, renewal rate, and more. |
| 10:45 | BREAK | |
| 11:00 AM | 10 Laws of Customer Success | Customer Success is growing every day. With all the tactics and strategies floating around, it can be hard to turn the overflow of information into an organized strategy. This session will cover 10 fundamental laws of Customer Success that you can use to give your frameworks some more focus. |
| 11:30 AM | Ask-Me-Anything Session with Nick Mehta, CEO, Gainsight | This session is a great opportunity to engage candidly with the CEO of the #1 fastest-growing company in the Bay Area, Nick Mehta of Gainsight. Bring your questions—even the hard ones. Nick will rapid-fire answer as many of them as he can, starting with the ones upvoted in real time by attendees. |
| 12:15 PM | LUNCH | |
| 1:00 PM | Pulse Academy Competition, It's a Tradition | |
| 1:15 PM | Traits of a Great CSM | Not every CSM is created equally. What habits and traits are required to move from good to great? In this session, we will explore the key traits found in the most effective CS professionals and provide a tangible approach for becoming a "rock star" CSM. |
| 2:00 PM | Customer Journey Mapping Workshop | A customer journey map is a key part of Customer Success strategy, and in this session, we’re diving deep into the methodology for doing it right. You’ll learn invaluable skills like how to define key personas, build out playbooks, understand success across the customer lifecycle, define key stages, and more. At the end of the session, you’ll have the tools you need to create meaningful journeys for your customers. |
| 2:30 PM | Customer Health Score Workshop | The process of designing and implmenting an effective customer health score requires a careful balancing act of identifying meaingful measures and threasholds while keeping it simple. We will give you some very practical guidance and share best practices. The fundamental goal of scorecards is to improve customer retention and expansion by having better line-of-sight into risks and growth opportunities. |
| 3:00 PM | BREAK | |
| 3:15 PM | Two CSMs Walk into a Starbucks | This fun and interactive session will feature two principal-level Customer Success Managers having "coffee talk" about best and worst practices. Top audience-voted topics will be covered such as EBRs, Risk Management, Surveys, Comp Structures, etc., giving everyone practical takeaways. |
| 4:00 PM | Final Thoughts and Session Wrap | |
| 4:30 PM | PULSE CERTIFICATION EXAMS | |
| Time | Title | Description |
| 7:30 AM | Registration Open & Light Breakfast | |
| 8:30 AM | PULSE ACADEMY KEYNOTE with Dan Steinman | |
| 9:15 AM | Customer Success: An Academic’s Perspective | In this short opening presentation, we will hear from Professor Bryan Hochstein, PhD, MBA, Assistant Professor of Marketing & Sales, University of Alabama, about why the attention-getting topic of customer success compelled him to dedicate time to understand and research this exciting and rapidly evolving methodology. |
| 9:30 AM | Elevating your EQ game, CSM-style | You're an advanced CSM. You know how to drive adoption, ensure renewal, and forecast with the best of them. Ever wondered what's next or how you can improve? Emotional Quotient (EQ) is the answer. EQ is what separates average CSMs from the great ones. In this session, Nils Vinje, VP of Customer Success at Rainforest QA, will take you through elevating your EQ Game—CSM Style. |
| 10:15 AM | Advanced Segmentation Workshop | You already know about the basic pyramid touch model. But what are the best-practices strategies when you have a complex customer population? Do you segment on revenue-band, region, industry, product, strategic-logo, partners/channel, etc.? These questions and more will be discussed actively during this class workshop led by Eve Kedar, EdD, Gainsight's Sales Enablement Manager. |
| 10:45 AM | BREAK | |
| 11:00 AM | Lessons in Financials for Customer Success | You understand your retention and churn numbers and how they are derived. But what does a CFO think about when looking at the same book of business as you? COGS vs SG&A and overall cost vs ARR, % of New ACV from Upsells & Expansions, CAC Ratio, CAC Payback Period, FCF Margins, Attainment analysis, Rule of 40...whew. This session, led by Igor Beckerman, Gainsight’s CFO, will serve as a primer to highlight the most important financial measures used by your execs and BoDs that go beyond basic CS metrics. |
| 11:30 AM | Ask-Me-Anything Session with Allison Pickens, Chief Customer Officer, Gainsight | This is an incredible opportunity to engage openly and freely with CS thought leader Allison Pickens, Chief Customer Officer at Gainsight. Bring your questions—even the hard ones. Allison will rapid-fire answer as many of them as she can, starting with the ones upvoted in real time by attendees. |
| 12:15 PM | LUNCH | |
| 1:00 PM | Pulse Academy Competition #2 | |
| 1:15 PM | Why Challenging Your Customers Can Backfire | Challenging prospects is a proven way to get them to do something different. But what about when it’s time to convince your customers to renew with you or even get them to do something different or potentially expand? Join Tim Riesterer, co-author of “The Three Value Conversations” as he shares science-backed messaging research on how you can convince your customers to stick with you while simultaneously improving your relationships. |
| 2:15 PM | Customer Success That Scales | What are the best ideas and methods for executing an effective and scalable Customer Success program as you get many more customers? How do you keep delivery consistent and costs in check? Is Customer Success a function in its own right, or a part of your product? What skills do you need as you grow? When do you use which channel? How do you measure business performance? These and other related topics will be covered in this lively session, led by Michael Grafham, Principal Program Manager, Customer Experience, Microsoft – come prepared for a discussion! |
| 3:00 PM | BREAK | |
| 3:15 PM | The Future of CS: What happens to CS in a consumption or outcomes-based model? | Customer Success luminary Dan Steinman shares his vision of the future state of the Movement. How will Customer Success naturally evolve over the next 3-5 years? How will changing business models impact Customer Success in a consumption or outcomes-based world? |
| 4:00 PM | Final Thoughts and Session Wrap | |
| 4:30 PM | PULSE CERTIFICATION EXAMS | |
| Time | Title | Description |
| 7:30 AM | Registration Open & Light Breakfast | |
| 8:30 AM | PULSE ACADEMY KEYNOTE with Dan Steinman | |
| 9:15 AM | Advanced Outreaches | While Gainsight's CoPilot does a fantastic job delivering customized, personal emails to your customers for specific conditions, you may want to do more. Advanced Outreaches expand upon this capability, allowing you to design multi-step outreaches that guide your customer through a responsive series of email interactions to reach an enhanced outcome. In this session we will review a common use case and teach you how to configure a full outreach. |
| 10:00 AM | Scorecards 2.0 | Scorecards provide you with a way to easily track customer health, but what if you want multiple scorecards to map to different customer segments? Whether you're on Gainsight original scorecard technology and want to upgrade to Scorecards 2.0 OR are already using Scorecards 2.0, in this session we'll cover how to configure and manage both Account and Relationship scores as well as provide you with more than one scorecard! Come prepared for a hands-on workshop on common scorecard use cases. |
| 10:45 AM | BREAK | |
| 11:00 AM | Success Plans Enablement & Use Cases | So you've had an Executive Business Review and now you have a long list of next steps. How do you track them and work together with your customer to help them adopt your product? Success Plans are a key Gainsight feature, providing you with all you need to create Objectives and Tasks to achieve success. In this session, our Customer Success experts will demonstrate common examples to help get you up to speed on using this great feature. Additionally, our product experts will show you how to use new filters and other customizable features. |
| 11:30 AM | Ask-Me-Anything Session with Karl Rumelhart, Chief Product Offier, Gainsight | This session will give you the opportunity to engage openly and freely with Gainsight's Chief Product Officer, Karl Rumelhart. Bring your questions—even the hard ones. Karl will rapid-fire answer as many as he can, starting with the ones upvoted in real time by attendees. |
| 12:15 PM | LUNCH | |
| 1:00 PM | Timeline Enablement & Use Cases | How are you tracking day-to-day interactions with your customers? If you do track them, are you able to easily and centrally share them with the rest of your organization? In this session, we will review common Timeline use cases, demonstrate how Timeline is the place you want to record that information, and teach you how to customize Timeline event types for quick access to some of the most critical touch points along your customer's journey. |
| 1:45 PM | Data Management (S3 Connector) | Data is the fuel that powers Gainsight's ability to provide customer insights and help you drive customer adoption, retention, and expansion. But what if you have data you can't easily get into the Matrix Data Architecture (MDA)? In this session, we'll focus on Gainsight's S3 Connector. You'll learn how to use your S3 "bucket" to load data easily and efficiently through hands-on exercises and learn techniques to avoid common pitfalls. |
| 2:30 PM | Topic Specific Workshops | After all training sessions are completed, participants will be invited to select two topics to work through in workshop format. Gainsight team members will be available for every subject area and will help learners work through exercises for each topic. A workbook will be provided covering all the day's topics, so participants can continue working on material after the workshop ends. |
| 5:00 PM | SESSION FORMALLY ENDS | |
| 5:10 PM | Bonus Session: Sponsored by Azuqua | Killer Automations to Help Extend and Manage Gainsight Across Your CompanyAt Azuqua, we help people build powerful integrations and automations for their SaaS apps, including Gainsight, Salesforce, Zendesk, and hundreds of other applications. Join us for a hands-on meet-up over drinks to workshop scenarios that will help you drive greater adoption of Gainsight and automate business processes around it within your organization…and then we’ll see what we can build right there in the session! And if you needed even more reasons to show up, all attendees will also be entered into a drawing to win one free year of Azuqua, to be selected at the end of the session. |
Online registration is now closed. Register on-site any day at the front entrance.
The First Customer Success Festival, Presented by Slack
Coachella. Bonnaroo. Lollapalooza. SuccessFest. If you're wondering how we step it up after last year's aircraft carrier party, SuccessFest is the answer. Food trucks, art cars, live music from the legendary 80s band Tainted Love, and an actual, full-size Ferris wheel. And there are plenty more surprises to come!
Interested in sponsoring Pulse 2018?
Learn more about sponsorships
Whether you are traveling solo or with colleagues, you have the opportunity to immerse yourself fully in local life by staying in a private rental home through Airbnb. Use the map and event location indicators, star ratings, reviews, and additional filters to find the best home for your needs.
We booked blocks of rooms at these three nearby hotels. Those blocks have sold out, but the hotels still have rooms available at their regular rates! Click the links below to go to each hotel's online booking portal.
San Mateo, CA 94402
Distance: 1.5 miles $279/night
Pulse room block is sold out, but rooms are still available
Burlingame, CA 94010
Distance: 6.5 miles $219/night or best available rate
Pulse room block is sold out, but rooms are still available
Burlingame, CA 94010
Distance: 7.0 miles $219/night or best available rate
Pulse room block is sold out, but rooms are still available
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Katie KortniePhenomenal week at #PulseConf2017 connecting & learning from some of the best #CustomerSuccess.
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Eitan SabanThank you @akennada @nrmehta and team @GainsightHQ for such insightful, empowering & epic #PulseConf2017 see you all next year #gratitude