Beyond One-Off Outbound: Mapping Engagement Governance Across Your Account Team

If you want to know the story about the genetic testing and the discovery of yourself, maybe we can talk about it later on. I don't want to be talking all about me. I may have to present something. I think it's pretty cool.

It could be interesting, especially from the discussion that we had with the keynote. There was a lot of the same themes that you don't notice. Now you don't notice that I have an accent. If you don't understand something I've said, come to me later on and we can talk about it.

I also love questions, but I was told to keep the question for the end. We'll do that later. Today we're ultimately going to talk about what Bumi has built for the accounts team organization and essentially what we've done around it and why we've built it specifically. Before I go into the presentation, I want to quickly introduce Bumi.

Bumi is the number one independent data activation company in the world. We have a deep root into everything AI because essentially we deliver the data. We deliver the security and access to it. We have 75,000 AI agents currently in productions.

We have been the leaders in the magic quadrant for the last 12 years consecutive. We have quite a big, large footprint on the SaaS industry. We have 30,000 customers globally. We are a large enterprise company that serves enterprise company, B2B essentially.

Of those customers, we have many of them that serve 14,500 customers. As an enterprise company, what Bumi has done is when we looked at our customer journey, we've created role specialization where you can see the marketing team essentially picks up the leads, pass it on to the sales, sales close it, and then you have the people of professional services that comes in and customer success and renewal. That's not something that nobody has heard before. I'm sure this is very typical of enterprise to segment those roles.

It's not because it creates a certain level of efficiency around the new customer acquisition and the pipeline of those customers. It goes very quickly because you pass on as you go to different milestone and stages. It also creates some challenges. One of those challenges you'll see is that communication between those special position becomes particularly difficult.

One of them is a result of using different system, different workflows, different OQRs for each of those specialization. When people are working in their own specific silos and they don't have a reporting structure that foster the ability to talk to each other when they're working together, that's something that can trip and create features in the organization and ultimately can leave a poor customer experience. One other thing which is really important to this presentation is that those silos are created such a way that there is not really an opportunity for an individual contributor to have strategy that merges until you get to the executive level. They have their manager, they have their directors, they report to those people directly, perhaps a VP, but the people actually see what's going on really well across the whole organization at the executive level.

There's difficulties of when you want to talk to different people, you're going to see something like this where the executive is going to look at the organization and look at centralized data so you have all the data in one place and everybody can access it. Sometimes messy data, but that's okay. You've got the data there. But you end up with people working in their own little unit forming micro companies within a large organization and not talking to each other.

If you take an analogy of a toddler, if you have a toddler, you bring him to a daycare, you're going to see a toddler sitting next to a child and you'll see both of them playing together, but then they're actually not playing together, playing individual games parallel to each other. The associative play happens later on the stage. We find that some companies, some enterprise end up in that situation because you've built a structure that is siloed and doesn't foster specific conversation. I wish I could ask if you have any questions yet, but I'm going to do that.

Keep the question for later. I want to dive a little bit deeper into that idea of silos. When you look at the sales org or customer success orgs, you'll often find that they have the same business operation pillars that have been put in place to deliver to those specific organizations. I'm talking about the strategy pillar, the business needs, we need to do something specifically.

The strategy often is what drives the separation and different silos because the strategy will determine which technology you want to leverage for your organization to succeed. Then the data is on the side as well. The data and the technology merge together. Strategy needs to feed from those two elements.

It's kind of a loop. I've actually done a YouTube channel about it, so if you want to know about what I'm talking about, you can check out my YouTube channel at home. When you look at the executive perspective, what you're going to realize is that that landscape is fragmented. You're going to see tempos of operation for sales and tempos of operation for services, but then when the customer needs to actually engage with both of them, it becomes really, really challenging.

It becomes like a really big manual effort that is very reactive as opposed to be proactive. When we realize all those things that boo me, we took on the challenge of trying to address that specific situation. This is kind of what we looked at. The challenge is where we have different tech stack, we have different people with different workflows that are working together, but ultimately we have one single customer and we need to be able to engage with that customer.

The obvious answer was that we need to create a call to action. Now, when I'm talking about call to action, not talking about call to action in Gainsight because again, CS might be in Gainsight, but sales lives in Salesforce or any other CRM that they might be using. Creating call to action that the other team does not see is not really helpful. We actually took the lowest sign going through possible to actually achieve the call to action that we want to achieve and we'll use emails because ultimately when you have a new employee coming into the company, the first thing they will get is a new inbox.

That's a tool that everybody has access to and we can actually deliver information to. That's always the same thing when things seem so obvious and so simple, it's never that simple to get to that conclusion, which is why I wanted to give a little bit of context before I talked about it. The email itself is one thing which is interesting, but I'll refrain that emails is not very mode of communication, like sending one email to one person is not to not achieve exactly an outcome that can be measured. You really want to keep that in mind and essentially what you do for your customer when you send them emails on a journey, you want to do the same thing internally.

You do a retrospect of, "I want to make sure I engage the right people at the right time and I want to follow up and I want to have compliance built and accountability and I want to measure the success of that email thread, that email program." The way to build the call to action on a cross-functional system is that you want to make sure that all the metrics that you're delivering to everybody is the same. It's kind of the idea, I'm not a religious person, but I'll use that analogy anyway. It's like the holy grail, where you want all the night of the roundtable coming together on the same place with a purpose to achieve something. You don't want to send an email to a person that you don't know what's going to happen with that email if they can even see it or read it.

You want to involve the whole account team together to make sure there's accountability built across each other. One advantage of that technology of leveraging what you use for your customer, the journey orchestrator internally, is that you have the same view as that person viewed that email. They clicked on any of the information that I've delivered. You can actually leverage that information to create a program that goes directly to the management team and looking to make sure that when the managers meet with their direct reports, they have an engagement around the action that they were supposed to have taken.

You built accountability within the structure of the email itself because you're leveraging a CRM to actually see that information. Now, again, very important aspect here is the vertical structure. You can send email to the account team that's giving an account-based email. You're going to involve everybody on the account team that is directly touching that specific account.

That would be the account manager, the renewal person, the CS person, potentially the professional services person if that's needed. That would be like once you get the data to generate that email, you're going to send them to them directly. You don't want to do the same thing for the manager and director and the VP and potentially the executive. You want to tailor that same data source, that same entity in such a way that it's structured to address the need of oversight that the manager needs to have.

When you send that email to the manager, you might send it on a weekly basis as opposed to one day every time, on real time almost. You might not want to show every account, but you might just look at the portfolios on my team specifically, what have they been doing, what have they been receiving, and what type of interaction you're going to be leveraging to move forward with the workforce and the success you're looking to measure. Something with the director, so the director would be perhaps at the regional level as opposed to a team level. As you go up, you change the scale, the temporal scale in some ways so that's when he's sending it, so maybe on the monthly and maybe the VP would be a quarterly view.

Then also at the landscape level, like a team versus regional versus anything else. Again, the idea is to foster compliance and accountability and ownership around the communication that you're engaging with the customer. I was really told that I really should talk about how we built it. We essentially leveraged John Yerkesterter.

When you do that, you have an option to do the outbound communication, which could be leveraging your contact information. In this case, we're actually using the user information, which is leveraging your user base in Gainsight. In our particular instance, we have Salesforce and Gainsight connected together, so we see all the users from Salesforce we have that contact list we can send email to. The usage data that we're leveraging for those emails is popped into John Yerkesterter.

The JO runs every day. You're going to see which customer falls into the threshold. Then we pick up the account team that belongs to that specific customer and start communicating with them to let them know that there's an opportunity to do something as an account team. One thing as well.

In terms of the build, JO is extremely powerful. You can do a lot of things with it, but the reality is that you will likely want to create multiple programs, so one for the accounting specifically and potentially a different one for the management. Also, as you go into the vertical structure of your organization, just because it makes it easier to actually cross-check somebody has actioned the email as opposed to keeping it all into one program. Just something to think about if you're going to go build something along those lines.

Really the idea is that we go from parallel plays, siloed workflows, and people don't talk to each other, sales hiding a deal. They don't really want to do that, or sometimes they do, but they don't really want to hide those deals. They just don't have the system in place, the techs tapping in place to facilitate easy transition. Once you ultimately achieve that alignment, not at the executive level, but actually at the individual contributor level, you'll see a great amount of success.

Now, the techs is so small, I'm going to have to squeeze in there, but one thing I was particularly proud of is when we looked at the CSQL that we were delivering in 2024 where one in four was actually rejected by sales, that alignment actually created a rejection rate which was much lower, whereas only one in 13 get rejected by the accounting. That's something to be very proud of. Another thing that we know for sure is that we actually recovered about $8 million in ACV. That money would not have been brought in had we not been put into that program specifically.

The program we were looking at is usage data, so people overusing the messages and techs that we're providing as booming organization. That's really helped us to either sell them more or change the way they're doing it by involving the professional services. Again, that's the idea of having a view across the whole account team so people can engage and find the best way forward to help the customer move on. That account team built up actually recreated a great way of us to be able to forecast renewal.

Now, that's really keen on correlation versus causation. This might be a moral correlation where we've seen a change. We've implemented many, many different things to achieve that really great forecast of renewal. One of them bringing in some AI agent actually look at all the data that we have from the customer.

This program that's fostering more accountability across the account team and ownership across the account team plus some compliance with the director. There's multiple factors that have really helped us to achieve that really great forecasting renewal, but I think the email is part of them because it creates an alignment and we all can you from Canada. I'm born in France and from Canada, so I'm usually the can you reference. We can you across the same direction together.

There's another tiny one down there. Oh yeah, I mentioned about that. That's the time engagement. The opportunity to actually have more engagement from our professional services, bringing them on early when realizing there's a problem with the customer and the utilization of the tool.

Very quick summary slide before we finish. Again, it's kind of a low hanging fruit emails like was an obvious one. We're using and leveraging technology that was built to communicate with the customer, but we're actually doing that with our internal resources, our employees. Key elements is the vertical structure, so you don't want just to send one email.

You want to have follow up. You want to have action plans. You want to have clear ownership around those emails, just like you would when you're communicating with the customer. Then building that vertical structure as well to make sure that everybody is on the same page as in alignment where the managers know what's going on with the employees.

I'll use one more slide just talking about the future because one thing was very obvious is that using email is kind of the low tech touch and we are nearer of AI agent running around. What does that mean for the programs that we built? The really interesting thing is although emails is really low touch, all those AI agents, Tech-Ace being one of them or any other LLM, actually plugged into inboxes. That means now we have a very clear record for a very specific action and we can see what the email was about, who was in this email, and it's already an inbox.

The LLM can actually pick up that information and it actually can become part of the fabric that makes the sentiment or the view of what's going on with the customer. I think maybe in a few months because things are moving so quickly or maybe in a few years, all that technology will be running by itself. That's totally possible. The AI will know that there's overconsumption and we should essentially send them an email and work a success plan around that specific point of data, but we're not there yet.

In the meantime, we can still leverage that information and then layer on top of it AI that will have a very great data source to work with. Finally, I'm getting to my favorite part, which is the questions. I feel like I'm world vomiting to everybody. That's why I'm counting.

I'd like to have a bit of interactions and have a chat. Yes, that was great. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Yes. You want, you can start at the top. Can you share some examples of the customer KPIs you aligned? Yeah.

Yeah. The usage one was a very obvious one. We actually did a couple of things. We looked at license compliance in terms of how many of the licenses the customer is using and then determining the messages and are they overconsuming or are they ...

I mean, we have another program potentially with underconsumption, but overconsumption. Then we determined why is that happening. That gives a note to the account team to do research and determine why is this happening. Are they not using the license the right way or are they overusing it?

They don't even know about it yet themselves. At that point, you need to engage and come up with a plan that will determine what the best course of action is going to be for that specific customer. Now, part of the KPI is also the renewal. We built the program to be cognizant of there's a renewal in three months versus nine months and have that engagement built around that renewal date.

Are these communications triggering any human touch points? Yes. That's a very interesting question. They ...

So yes, the idea is that we send an email and then also that when you reply to the email and you reply all, it actually involves the account team. You obviously don't want to just have a reply to a no reply inbox. You want to be cognizant of that. The interesting thing is that we've actually ended up changing our customer assignment with the idea of that touch point specifically.

Here's the logic that we employed. We used to have customer success assigning the customer success people and the account team assigning whoever is the account team and that was not totally disconnected. When time came for them to have touch point, then people ended up with 20 meetings with different accounts because none of it was actually matched. We ended up building an assignment that was based on who is the account manager and repairing that account manager with a CS person.

Now, depending on which organization you're talking about, you might be looking at a very CS heavy organization where in which case you want to have one account managers with multiple CSM, but they are all working together all the time. When you have that meeting, you only have one meeting as opposed to 20 different ones. That's something you really want to be aware of if you want to go down that direction. How often are you iterating on these communications?

I have been pretty brutal with that. I don't like sending too many CTA's. I know people don't like CTA's. They don't like sending too many emails.

I know people don't like emails, but there's a reason why we're sending that one. That email is actually very, very explicit on to what needs to happen and who is involved in it. Again, the idea of building ownership and compliance. If that email is not being addressed, if the data shows that there's no big change, another email is going to be sent on a monthly basis.

I'm brutal in a sense like I keep sending the email until you're going to do something about it, but I think I'm not sending it every day. Obviously, that would be too much. I have a follow-up with that. You might not have this answer.

Have you looked into how many times, say a customer that typically doesn't respond, how many emails it takes for them to respond? A customer or a user? Maybe a user. Yeah, because I'm talking with the user.

We don't currently track that, but that would be a really interesting thing to look at. That might be something where we want to leverage AI because I don't want to be able to report for that. It might be a nice little challenge. They might just need a few more emails sent to them with a headline.

No, I think they're going to be sick of me. That's for sure. Is there an account load this governance model fails or doesn't scale? Well, yes.

I would think that this is very ... We call it a name segmentation around that. The idea is that you have a CSM assigned. For our long-term or our tech touch customer, depending on which vocabulary you want to use, we do currently ...

We started with not assigning CSM. We've changed that to actually assigning a CSM. The poor CSM is just a really large portfolio. The idea is that obviously the workload is reduced because people are dealing with hundreds of customers.

I could imagine that for those specific customers, that would be extremely challenging to create that type of workflow. It's more like a customer versus CSM in account management. If you have to bring everybody into ... With a long tail, that would be quite challenging.

Again, not really something that would be realistic, I think. Can you elaborate on how you plan to automate this process leveraging AI? Yeah. The road is not created yet to leverage where we're staying, so the keynote.

We're going to explore this. I am really, really excited with the Gensight MCP that's coming along. I'm really, really eager to do more with Terkase. I think this is a tool that is fantastic.

It's so much more that could be done with it than we've actually done ourselves. That automation ... There's actually an interesting aspect to that question specifically. I do not believe that automation needs AI.

We already have tools that do automation. You don't need to put AI on top of it. Now, if you need to have some, I would say, some reasoning, some analysis, and then making determination based on that analysis of large amount of data, text, B, text, or video. I think AI is a great tool for that.

For purely automation, you really don't need AI for that. I hope I answered the question. If I haven't, I'll be happy to chat. Do you have a question?

I feel like I saw someone with a hand raised over there. No? Okay. Ignore me.

I feel like I keep seeing something. Just a fly. Do you have any processes or automations around contact hygiene, keeping the contact email roll and level up to date? Million dollar question.

Oh, yes. That's a good one. Have the answer. I don't have ...

I know what I want to do with it. But yeah, I have not done it yet, but I have hope. I have a lot of hope around AI and that. I do.

I see MCP all over that. Yeah, yes. Is that person still working in that company? All that type of thing is where AI is great at it.

There's a lot of hope for that, but I've not done it yet. I've been trying to do that type of thing for five years, ever since I've worked with Gainsight. Every company I've worked with, contact management is a huge challenge. Once it's up to date, then a stakeholder changes, some of the faves, and it's not up to date.

Which is why you want to have automation around it, right? Exactly. Yes, exactly. That one's small.

As execution on accounts becomes increasingly agent-led, what are your thoughts on how cross-functional governance evolves to provide controls around agents being used by each team? Yes, that's also a really loaded question here. I have a lot of opinions around it. Some of them are not necessarily Gainsight friendly.

When I look at working as a team, you want to have alignment on everybody doing the same thing for the same reason. Providing an agent to everybody so they can actually do their own thing is actually creating more silos. That was kind of an argument I was having with a few years ago when we were working with another company, they were looking to actually provide a C360 that was customized to each individual. So everybody could actually see their own thing and then Gainsight built that technology to allow it to happen.

I felt for myself, that's my opinion, that it was not the right way to move forward because it creates even more silos that we're already experiencing with. Where you have an individual that's actually a very specific view on what's going on in an account. So I'm going to take an account health perspective. If you created a view that's going to say, "Hey, my account is great because I'm only looking at that fraction of the data and that fraction of the insight and I'm not doing what everybody else is doing and I'm potentially not even doing what the director or the VP or the executive want me to do.

I'm just building my view. I'm doing great." Well, I think it's just going to lead to a catastrophe at some point. You want to have conversation. It's sometimes a difficult conversation on the aligning of what is important for our organization and where we want to go in terms of success.

So I'm a little bit worried with AI, like providing AI at that level of independence. It's great, it's powerful. But then are we, again, like assembly, like social media? I've got children, so I have a lot of opinion around those type of things.

We built this tool to actually talk to each other, but in the end, we just stopped talking to each other. I think you want to foster more communication, more alignment as opposed to just making it easy, looking at your own thing. Perfect. Any other questions from anyone that, or any follow-ups?

All right. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Those great audience.