Clearing the Path: How Infor Rebuilt Gainsight Around the Customer Journey

Yes logistics. Do you guys want to run through quick intros for the audience? Sure my name is Brian Raiser. I'm from Indianapolis, Indiana.

I'm married. Second marriage for both of us. We have six kids and nine grandkids. Wow.

Pretty busy. My three sons are all adult firefighters and as a customer success executive I can tell you for sure that we will all put out more fires than they will combined in their entire career next week. I was gonna say you are also a firefighter. Austin Basham.

I've been with him for a little over a year and a half. I'm a customer success manager focusing on PDR. Born and raised in Wichita, Kansas. I have a three-year-old, a two-year-old, and one on the way.

So staying busy along the side with tons of free time. Thank you for being here. Hello. I'm Kristie Jones.

I've been in for for over 12 years now. Started off as a customer success manager and moved into the operation side. So I'm currently the director of customer success operations. I do mostly program and portfolio management implementing large-scale initiatives that are highly cross-functional.

Awesome. Thank you. Alright let's get going. We'll see.

You might have a clicker problem. There we go. Okay. You know, technical difficulties.

So we've got a poll. We're gonna start off with that. So if we can switch over to the Slido, go into room 105 in the app and we will do this poll. Here's a quick little preview for you but we'll go and do it through Slido.

We'd like to know for everyone in the room where you are, if you're a Gainsight user, in your current environment right now. Are things working really well or is it time to restore the ruins? Maybe do some improvements or just clear the land. Raise it all.

Start again. Or are you just getting started? Are you guys able to see the poll in the app? Just making sure.

No, it's okay. Great. Okay. We're just working on the screen.

So give you lots of time to think about it. I think Slido stayed at the party really late last night. There we go. Okay.

Or not. Yeah, if it's not gonna work, maybe we can... We'll try with the next one. So maybe a couple hands raised on where you guys are right now.

Is anybody... Or what's working well? Does anyone have instances that are working well? Raise your hands.

We've got one in the back. One in the back. Awesome. Love it.

Fantastic. Anyone feel like they just need to restore the ruins? Get it up to snuff. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. Okay. Hey now.

Hey now. Anyone need to just start over? Clear the land. Okay.

I need to figure out who your CSMs are and give them some warning. Anybody just getting started? Awesome. Hey, you guys are...

That's great. You're gonna understand some of the pitfalls maybe ahead of time. Fantastic. All right.

So we're our panelists here today. When did you guys realize that you weren't leading the expedition, that you were really wandering in the ruins? Based on my experience, so prior to being at Infor, I was actually a consultant implementing Gainsight for Gainsight's small business and tech touch market. And so coming to Infor had very much familiar...

familiarize myself with with Gainsight, but trying to understand what is relevant to me versus what is relevant to stakeholders and then where do I go to get the information I need was probably the hardest part. You know, along the lines of when you start a new job, you're drinking out of a fire hydrant already. So we've very much relied on tribal knowledge instead of just being able to go in and be very much proactive in the system. For me, it was really just...

Infor management, our team just had a voracious appetite for new reporting. I'm not sure if that... I see a lot of heads nodding, so it's the same for you guys. And you kind of thought AI was going to change that.

It was going to make your job easier, right? But it actually made it more difficult and there were more requirements that came out of that. So as new requirements came, different people just changed the Gainsight environment. They started tracking things.

They didn't really vent. They didn't really put it through a process. We just made the change. And there was just more and more noise and we kind of lost a little bit of control of that.

And this showed itself in drop downs and different things that just kept getting added, but nothing came away. So we were in desperate need of addition through subtraction. We needed to subtract a lot of the things that we weren't utilizing or weren't effective and weren't helping our customers and really get down to the core issues. So that was the big wake up call for me.

Yeah, and then from the operations perspective, we were drowning. And I say, I'm going to keep looking at Annie Morris here on our second round. She's our Gainsight admin. So she's done a lot of the work that we'll be talking about here, but we were really trapped in the break fix cycles.

We were just putting out fire so much that we couldn't be strategic at all. And because things were so broken, the teams were coming up with their own shadow processes outside of the system. So now we have data existing in places that we can't use. And the system is broken and we're not able to do anything strategic from either perspective.

So that's when as an ops team, we made the decision that we've got to do something different here. I think the number of times I said, you could do that in Gainsight. Everyone could have visibility. Right.

All right. Yeah. So that makes sense that you really realized that things weren't working for you guys. All right.

So now we can go to the poll number two. So how well for everyone out there, do your systems map to how your teams actually work? So do you have a clear trail or the path might exist, but it's pretty overgrown. Some of you might be lost.

The Slido that's showing is not ours. That is the wrong Slido. We're not talking about staircase. Hey, so we're going to do hands again.

Let's just go back to the slides and we'll do hands. That's perfect. Sorry about that. Okay.

So how well do your systems out there map to how your teams actually work? Do you have a clear trail? Does the path exist, but maybe it's overgrown? There we go.

That is the correct one. Next Slido. Are we maybe lost in the wilderness or I know some of you haven't even started your expedition yet, but curious. A couple things.

Oh, wow. What's overgrown? Okay. Oh, I'm sorry for those that are lost.

Hopefully you got a map this week. Nobody has a clear trail. Well, you're not alone if you don't have a clear trail. There's a lot of us there in that same there's a lot of us that are in that that same boat.

And that was really a big part of the project. When we started our project, the main goal of it was we need to streamline, we need to make it easier, and we need to make it more effective. And basically one of those rules, if it doesn't come up in a customer conversation, how much does it really need to be a part of Gainsight? Gainsight is designed and it's meant to be a customer facing tool.

It's not meant to be an admin tool for driving internal projects for us. It's meant to be a way for us to communicate with the entire organization, what's going on in their account, so they can move that forward. And I think a lot of you guys have the same problem we did that we described. The paths exist, but it's really overgrown.

There's a lot of stuff in there that you don't need. Let's go back to the slides. Thank you very much. All right.

So I know when we were working together and we first started talking about improving Gainsight, we kind of had a couple options. It was clear the land completely and start over with a new fresh instance, or do you restore the ruins and work with what you have and make it better? So I know we had a lot of conversations, Kristy, but you did. You talk about how you chose to do it.

Yeah, so we debated a couple of different paths. Do we phase out fixing a few things, enabling, and then go into the next priority? Or do we just shut it down and do the work and relaunch all at once? We called it the Big Bang.

We thought we wanted to do the phased approach, that that would have the least amount of impact and disruption to the teams and how they were working. But what we found in practice is that it was really difficult to change or fix or get rid of one thing without it breaking multiple things downstream that we couldn't even always predict because of how overgrown and how interconnected everything that was currently built was. So we went with which path is going to give us the most long-term stability, and that was the let's shut it down. We didn't completely rebuild the whole instance.

We worked with what we had, but we really wanted to focus on clearing out the tech debt to have a clean slate to start from. And a lot of those customizations that we had in place, we needed, right? They were customized for a reason, so we didn't want to throw the baby out with the bath water. So we had to really dig in and figure out what do we keep, what do we move forward with, but also how do we reduce the operational noise long enough to actually just get the work done.

So yeah, so that was how we ended up making that decision. And I like how you guys really thought about while you were working with what you had and improving it, you did have that kind of blackout time and you did really go through a relaunch motion to drum up excitement, focus on enablement, and have that fresh feeling for the team without having to start completely from scratch from an instance perspective. We called it the blackout period, which from there was born the name of our project. We called it Project Brightside because when you come out of that dark phase, you would be on the bright side.

We made a Spotify playlist to go along with the project. Just we tried to have a good time with it because it was a lot, it was painful, right? This is the system that CSMs should have been using to communicate with their customers, and that was already difficult. Now we were going to make it a bit more painful for a little while while we tried to fix and improve the back end of the system and do a lot of changes just to create a cleaner, less overgrown instance.

You know what Emily, we forgot? What do we forget? Who's Infor? That's in some context of who we are.

So guys, real quick, if you don't know about Infor, we're an ERP company. We've got about 18,000 employees worldwide, a worldwide company. Customer Success Organization is about 300 people like Austin and I worldwide taking care of customers. So our instance is pretty big and a lot of customers to take care of, and it's one of the most complex environments that you can exist in.

Obviously, ERP and ours is even more complex because take each one of our ERP systems and we've got three main ones, and then our secret to our success is our vertical markets. So take each one of those ERPs. Now put eight different vertical markets that are specialized to cut down on your customizations. Now you get 24 separate ERPs.

So to say it's complex and there's a lot going on at Infor is a real understatement. You're a big ship to steer. You don't make quick agile changes. We do not.

All right, it's okay. All right, so once you decided to have that blackout period and kind of focus on the instance that you had, not starting fresh, but really figuring out what you needed, what didn't make the journey forward? How did you decide to leave those things behind? Yeah, so one of the first things were success plans, and it's not because we couldn't do it in Gainsight.

We really as a team wanted to do it in Gainsight, but we got a lot of pushback and we're going to talk about that pushback from users, from doing things the way they like to do them in the historical way. And I see a lot of heads nodding. You guys have experienced that too. They just didn't want to let go of what they did.

And the success plans that we had, truthfully, in some ways it looked kind of like a wiki page, right? It just didn't fit in Gainsight and some of the users wanted information to come back out and format it in a certain way. So we knew because of the complexity and everything that was the requirements, it just wasn't, it just there was a lot of other low-hanging fruit, much more important in success plans. You guys didn't want to shoehorn that in quickly.

You wanted to make sure. Right, because if we did, it wouldn't be right. And if it's not going to be right, there's no reason to do it. Yeah, and then I'll jump in.

We had a lot of manual processes that we were working, one of them being the way we understood how our customers were doing. So we, I want to see everybody's face when I say this, we manually collected customer sentiment where our CS folks would call our customers one by one and ask them how they were doing. And then they track this with a spreadsheet that was uploaded in the Gainsight that we could do absolutely nothing with from there, except I see there's so many facial expressions happening here. Those are not the most efficient, very unscalable process.

And we're like, you know what, we're not going to continue doing that if we have an opportunity to do it differently. So we did institute our very first data-driven customer health score. So we left, we wanted to leave behind as many manual processes as possible and take our first baby step towards automation. And what's going to really set us up for the future and even a lot of the AI capabilities that we wanted to do.

So manual processes left behind the big one being how we collected customer sentiment. Then three other pieces that I think are all relevant and kind of synonymous. It's your C360 dashboards and timeline, right? And we like to look at it as like the kiss methodology of like keep it simple, stupid.

So you'll see a slide later that goes into like how many activity types we had. But then management's asking, you know, hey, we need to track this. Well, then hey, you need to go to use this type. Well, then, oh, that team does this type.

Well, then where do we go? Right? Another piece is within the dashboards, right? You would have, you know, Brian or his management and then my management trying to kind of action the same exact thing.

But they would be going into one dashboard and then the other team would be going to the other and then hey, well, I need this field. Well, it's in a report over there. So I would say, you know, really killing the number of dashboards, the number of activity types, as well as really looking at the fields during that blackout phase within the C360 was a big piece of it, as well as like our relationship level data too. And I'll say I want to chime in for Annie on that one.

That change and the reduction in just the number of dashboards and fields took getting a lot of alignment. But also we just had to do some things and just we're going to shut off these today and they're just going to have to be forced to do something differently. It was a lot of effort both like in the system to do the work, but also just like with stakeholder building and project management wise, like getting alignment to to do all those things was a big effort. Yeah, for sure.

Anytime you can reduce the just manual effort it takes to for CSMs to do what they need to do the better. All right. Once the path was cleared, what actually changed for you guys on the ground as CSMs? You want to go first?

Yeah, I'll do it. So this is our money question. So if you're multitasking, this would be the point where I would pay attention. This is where we'll talk about not just what we did, but how we did it in the outcomes there.

All right, everybody's watching. Great. Go ahead, Brian. Surprised.

No, so I think like a couple things that really changed as we looked at like user stickiness and not just, you know, is everyone using the tool, but you know, looking at user personas, that is a key piece right there. So management's not doing the same exact thing we're doing. You know, we're not going in there. It's not a Power BI platform.

You know, we're actually key insights in there. And then another thing I would say that really changed and you'll hear about a little bit later within change management is just like the action in timeline. My timeline is the easiest thing to adopt ever, especially if you have gain site assist. So like really utilizing that I think is it's still being worked on, but I think that was the biggest win is really looking at timeline and focusing on that.

So, you know, say Brian was out and I was covering for him. That was something that was very beneficial. And instead of having to go into, you know, Brian's one note or, you know, his C drive, something of that nature. So I think that was very beneficial and just, you know, standardizing work processes, whether it's North America, depending on industry, Amia, etc.

We're all kind of doing the same same thing with the end goal in mind. I have not heard C drive in a while. So that shows you that I'm an Apple user. I was like, Oh, that's a term I haven't heard.

So I'm going to talk here for just a minute, because these are a lot of the changes that we made that really made the biggest impact for me and for my day to day. And it really comes down. I'm going to guess there's very few people that are left that are not recording meetings. I mean, every meeting I've got some AI agent is coming in or something in Microsoft Teams.

So that's not anything new. But what we did with that information was new, at least it was for our organization. So before in the problem that we had, remember, we talked about the complexity, all the different people, when we did when CSC system was first devised, right, the agenda was with our customers for our cadence meetings was yours plus mine equals ours. We all remember that from the 90s.

And it was a great way to do things. But in the changing environment and the way our business environment is today, it doesn't work anymore. Right. And the reason for that is, is we had people that created all of their own agendas, right?

300 of us depending on who did your training or what you what your favorite tool was. If you're customizing the agenda for your customer, they're all going to be different. Some were stored in OneNote, some in Word, some were just Excel spreadsheets. Now go try and figure out how to get that data and get everything coalesced when your manager calls and says, Hey, I want to know what's going on with this customer, you can't do it.

So what we did is we developed a way we devised a way to start, and how are we going to streamline that? How are we going to make it easier for CSMs? Because that is a lot of admin work to even prep up for a meeting. So we've we started out recording the meetings, right?

First thing in Microsoft Teams, and taking those transcripts, Annie and Kristie did an amazing job and took those transcripts from those meeting recordings, and then basically synthesize those, put them into our timeline entries for the stuff that was important for us as a CSM and what our organization wanted to track. So now all of a sudden, I'm not worried about taking notes, which we all understand that's the beauty, right? Of not having, you know, of recording meetings and doing all that, but I'm not even worried about the conversation. I'm just talking with my customer because Annie and Kristie are going to make sure I have the right data and information in my timeline through AI.

Save me a ton of time. The second big thing is, is when you when you do things that way, you can also go back and look and that is your agenda for your next meeting. Meeting creation, gone. I don't do anything outside of Gainsight anymore.

Third thing is when it goes in, the AI tool goes in and tells me what my action items are. I can decide, do I want to make that into a CTA? Do I want to delete it? What do I want to do with it?

So if I check, I make it into CTA. I assign responsibility, check the box, it shows up in my to-do list. I can run a report now in Excel and export it in Excel with every CTA that I've got in my entire portfolio, right? You said you weren't doing anything outside of Gainsight.

You know, you got me. But you know, the truth of the matter is when I get in and I get ready to talk to my customer, I go back to that timeline entry and I pull that up and they can see their words, right? From that transcript for that, for those CTAs and for those to-dos. What does that do for the customer?

Gives them confidence that their words were heard. Gives them confidence, no action items were missed. I wasn't taking notes, writing things down. I was listening and having a conversation with them, right?

Yeah, I feel that. No, I was just going to say I feel the same thing as a CSM, right? I can focus on having better conversations. I can be really present and engaged instead of having to furiously take notes.

So right there with you. I do think one thing that so what we're hearing is really time savings for you guys and confidence in the data and making sure you're not missing action items or any key important context. And now it's there for everybody instead of hidden in your C drive. Right.

And the other important thing is when you put that much data and you have that much accurate information, you know, AI obviously is going to be able to get that, do that a thousand times better than we're going to be able to do that as humans. So when your manager comes to you, remember that voracious reporting appetite that everybody has? Now I can go into Gainsight using the AI tool and pool specifics, whether that was six months before or, you know, last week. And I've got all, once you build that information up, your job becomes so, so much easier.

But Emily brought up a good point. And that is, you know, it cut basically prep meeting prep down prep time down from about 30 minutes per account to about five and doing that. And the results of it were were were much, much better. I don't know if we could even put a number on that.

Well, in terms of what else has changed, and I haven't heard it highlighted, but just even looking at what's on the slide is probably the administrative lift. I know Infor has, you know, a strong admin team, but having to maintain, you know, 17 activity or CTA types, 25 plus C360 layouts and, you know, stale records, that maintenance just takes time. And that was a big reason why they had to go through or they felt like they had to go through this is they felt like they were doing all their time, you know, hacking away at the overgrowth instead of actually creating a clear path for their team. And I'll say to time in on that, too, I think one of the big things that helped clear the path was we went with persona based dashboards, and we launched home pages, which we didn't have active before.

So we were able to take the sprawl of dashboards and really concentrate it into what people actually needed to see. Because you had leaders that could see everything, and that wasn't really well relevant for them, and vice versa. So the persona base, like really understanding what do people need to see? And where should they be looking for it?

I mean, just was astronomical change there. That's great. So what did you guys discover along the way that you weren't expecting? Granted, I wasn't the gain side admin or, you know, on Annie's team.

But doing this on the back end sounds somewhat straightforward. I think the the biggest issue that I experienced was, you know, being on the end user calls and, you know, Annie and Christy and team were presenting, hey, here's a new work process. And just the change management on the CSX side was mind boggling. You know, teams were really still wanting to use OneNote.

They were worried about customer data. But yet they were going into, you know, Salesforce, we had a like, you know, homegrown kind of CSX platform. And teams were still looking at if it ain't broke, don't fix it, but it was very much broken. So I think that was the hardest part was kind of realizing like, this is such a time saver, and you're all going to really benefit from this.

And yeah, we're drawing it back. So then we can actually like, be proactive with our customers. And then I think another thing was, we're not getting tapped on our on the shoulders by management, or, you know, executive leadership anymore as much for reporting. So I think like, trying to position that was was still difficult, because they were still in the mindset of, you know, hey, this works for me, right?

But it's not it's not working for everyone. And one size is not fit all. So you said something earlier, when we were talking about this, about that emotional attachment that some of the team has to the old way of doing things. Can you tell us a little bit more?

Yeah, you know, lack of lack of direction creates a vacuum. So people are going to develop their own processes. Well, you know, the customers are used to their way of doing things. And that's, and that's the that's the way they like to do it.

So when we came in and said, Hey, we're going to show you a new way to do it. I think one of the things that lesson learned for us, we should have done a better job of was explaining the benefit of that the why we're doing it and how that's going to benefit for you. Because a lot of these people put these put these processes developed them over time. I mean, we had, I'm not going to go in the creative, we don't have time for some of the things we saw that people were utilizing.

But the reality of it is they're like, man, this is the way my customer likes it. This is the way we're fine. We don't need to do that. Here's the problem.

If you don't move forward on this stuff, and you don't figure out a way to incorporate AI, we're all going to get left behind. We got to figure out ways to do that, to work smarter and faster. The data requirements are not going to get any smaller. My record, I mentioned that voracious reporting, it seems like it grows every week.

There's a new ask, a new ask, new ask. If I don't have that data in there, and if I hold on to those old ways of doing things, I'm not going to be able to keep up. There's no way. Christy, what did you see?

So there are two really big ones, operationally, the biggest one being that our leadership had made assumptions that just weren't correct about what should be implemented, how it should be used, and what was needed. Their requirements really satisfied, I think, with what they needed as a leadership team, but not necessarily what would work best for our customer-facing teams. So I'll go ahead and say, too, how we resolved that. I might be jumping the gun here, but this is how we even ended up on a panel together.

So our operations team and our customer facing folks, our CSMs and CSEs, operated in silos previously. So Annie and I put together a champion network where we identify who are our front runners and early adopters, who gets it, and we started meeting with them weekly, and listening, and watching how they work, and doing chair sides. I can't tell you how many chair sides Annie said, and just to watch how they move through a customer call to understand how do we rebuild our system to actually work within their own workflows, because most often we'll roll out a new process to the CS teams, and they're like, "Ugh, Ops is just giving us something else to do, and I don't need to do it. It's for them," when really it's designed to help them.

So using our champion network, and these two guys, I mean, we're just instrumental to helping us come up with our processes and the strategy there. Now they get to be the ones to deliver the message, and to show their teams, and to share it, which lands very differently, because they speak the language, and they trust each other. So that really changed just how we work together as an ops team and a CS team. But my second thing is we had made assumptions also, I feel like I'm going to throw our company under the bus, but we had made assumptions that managers and supervisors were just meeting regularly with their teams to enable them, and let them know what was going on, and that were these regular cadences that happened, and that was wrong.

They all met very differently, not consistently. There might be set agendas, and getting any additional topics in there was a challenge, let alone to try to enable the team and change their perceptions and minds about how we're using a tool. That's a big topic. So it wasn't even just a tooling issue.

There was just a lot of operational philosophy that we had to tackle with how do we just communicate internally, so that we're all speaking the same language and on the same page. I did move forward because you were addressing things that you did, but I think they're things that you are continuing to do to keep the jungle from taking the path back. I want to make sure we have plenty of time for Q&A, so I think that was really a good segue into what you're continuing to do. I think here would be great.

I think the team or the people in the room here might want some concrete next steps. So for anyone that's still deep in the jungle out there, there were a few that said they had an overgrown path. I'd love to hear from each of you what would be your recommendation on the first move. I'll start because I feel like it's just a continuation of what I was saying.

Listen to your teams. I think the first step is to understand what are they doing today, why are they doing it that way, and just listening as the first step to understand really what's that gap between what you think it should be and in reality and what's actually going to work. For me, I started talking about the importance of addition by subtraction. Subtract some of the noise so you can get to the things you really need to do.

Start with if you're in the jungle and you just really need to get control of it, start with one thing a quarter. Remove something a quarter, whether it's a CTA. Redo your drop boxes for how you process information and how you do that. But remove something and celebrate that removal because a removal can be just as important and impactful as adding new functionality when it comes to the noise.

I think kind of mentioned earlier like internal champions as Christy mentioned, but then also really looking at the end goal here, which is you want to focus on your customers and gain sizes there to help you. It's not there to where you're just living in that non-stop and not actually talking to your customers. I think that's the big piece here is really understanding that is a CSX tool. You're not sales, you're not product, you're using that tool to help kind of like a steroid shot with your customers.

So I think that is the biggest piece and then going back again, the kiss method never fails. Keep it simple, stupid and focus on your customers. Awesome, some great takeaways here. You guys will get the slides, so don't worry.

So I think this is something that they kind of all said was the teams that win aren't the ones that build the most stuff because they've been there and they've done that. They're the ones that remove what doesn't matter and create clarity. I think 100 percent. Fantastic.

All right, thank you everyone. All right, thank you everyone. We've got some time for questions. Thank you.

We have a few questions that are in the Slido already, but if you have more, please feel free to put them in while we go. I'm going to combine these top two. So can you talk more about that blackout period? So how long was it?

Was the instance fully out of commission or what was out of commission and how did you operate during that time? Great question. Andy, how long was it? Two months.

But the system was still available and usable. So the blackout period, what constitutes it as a blackout period, is we just weren't fixing all the things that popped up. It's like we're going to be changing things. You'll see things change in the UI and in the system and we're not even going to train you on it.

That'll come. So the blackout period was like continue using the system as normal. So it was available and they could still track things and do what they were normally doing. So their current processes didn't change.

But we also didn't roll out anything new during that period and we eased up on just responding to all the help desk tickets. So if you see something different. It's a long time, but don't bug me, right? Right.

So I think that with the second question, like how did you track data during that time? Like it was still up and running. And then also like, you know, for on the dashboard side of like those reports, I think we like just squeeze it down into like maybe a couple instead of, you know, five dashboards really completing the same goal. Right.

And we did put up on just a SharePoint site. They would track all the changes. So if something did change in the UI or something was different that people had a place to go and be like, okay, this is what changed and here's the impact. So we did have that visible for everybody.

How did you guys go about getting executive buy-in for this project? Man. So. Annie, would you like to come on up?

So there's a few different swim lanes here to getting the buy-in. But one is we Annie did a very good job actually of showing the financial impact and time savings. So it was very easy to quantify how much time we would save the CS team to free up time for them to be more strategic and do some of the other things. So we were able to quantify like how much time savings we would give.

But also because we want to be an AI, you know, focused company. We can't do all the AI things leadership wants to do without having the data in the tool, like period. So that was a really big selling point. Like if we want to get here, like here are the basic foundational pieces that we have to have in place.

And without executive buy-in, like we don't get that long-term benefit there. So that was probably a really big selling point. So you got the buy-in. Sorry, Austin, did you want to?

No, I'm good on that. Got the executive buy-in. How much discovery time did you need or did you take before starting, you know, to make the changes? You know, time for your chair sides, you're working with your champions.

Did that discovery go? Oh, man, it was a long time. It was kind of like ad hoc too, because we had like weekly calls or sometimes like biweekly focusing on certain topics. So it wasn't just like the big bang, you know, we would look at certain instances like timeline, and then we'd have like a subcommittee focused on types and another one would go into reports and then fields in the reports.

I think that was a big piece. So I would say there was a good six months. Does that sound reasonable? There was a good six months of just discovery and doing the chair sides and understanding workflows while getting leadership buy-in.

And like Austin mentioned, really topic by topic and making sure everybody understood the value. So a big switch here too that we had to make was changing the understanding of why we even use GainSight. When we first purchased it, I keep looking at, there's Jeremy in the audience. He used to work for our company and help implement GainSight way back in the day.

And we purchased it for a very different reason than why we use it today. So like that transition didn't happen with all the employees across the way. So we had some perspective shift. Like it's not just a survey tool anymore.

Like we're, this is, we need to be using it for all these other reasons. So we took that six month time frame to help start to change that perception to realign the vision for the tool. I'd love to know what your biggest lessons you learned about when it came to change management for the CSMs, especially Brian and Austin, your perspectives on your team. Yeah.

Change, you know, change man. Change is always hard, right? For CSMs or for anyone. But you know, you really have to do a good job of making sure the CSMs understand exactly what the benefit is.

I talked about that earlier. And I think, you know, in our organization, and I don't think ours is different from yours or anybody else's, a lot of time in the hectic pace of business, we get a lot of, you know, do this, but we don't, we don't dive into the why as much and really helping them understand the complete vision, not just why they're doing this specific thing, but the complete vision and what you're trying to get to and how that impacts that downstream. You can't, you know, everything can't be a committee meeting in a bit of executive presentation, but you can give them at least enough of it so that they understand. I'll tell you, this is a struggle for us.

I mean, getting folks like we talked about, tribal knowledge and wanting to hold on to those security blankets of the way they always did things. But again, you know, what we continue to talk to our teams about is, if we do it, here's the benefits that you're going to receive. Here's where it's going to make those those last minute executive reporting requests easier for you. Here's where you get those reference requests.

I've only got six counts, but I got a reference request for a specific product and I'm like, I don't even remember my customer talking about GRC in the last six months. Went into Gainsight, did a search, nothing in the last 90 days. That's what I thought. Okay, so let's expand that timeline.

We'll go out to a year. Sure enough, there it came. Customer, you know, was happy with GRC, liked it, and had some positive comments about it. It'd been working great, so if it works great, guess what?

I don't hear about it. So those are the types of things, but that information would have never been available to me had it not showed up in a transcript in a conversation that I had nine months ago. So when you can talk about real world examples and those types of things, the light bulb goes off and change management becomes an easier thing. I want to jump in on the...

You mentioned a couple things we talked this morning, though. I wanted to ask about learning from your pre-marriage counseling. Oh my gosh. Those were good.

Okay, stick with us here. Tune in for this. This is good. Oh my gosh.

So before I got married, I've been married for 12 years. We just had an anniversary on Sunday, but before we got married, we went to a couple of couples counseling sessions. Thank you. Thank you.

And the counselor said two things that really just blew my mind, and I share them as often as possible. One was, and every complaint is a wish. So if you can skip the complaining part and get to the wish, you avoid a lot of the friction along the way. Great.

The second one was, if you cannot explain yourself in less than two sentences, you're not done thinking about it. So when it came to even getting buy-in from executives, especially when you get up to the SVPs and C-suite, they have very short attention spans, and you've got to be able to give the value in what you're doing and why very succinctly. And even when it came to do we remove something or add something into the tool, if we can't clearly explain the benefit of it and why, then we need to think about it a little bit more and continue to simplify. So simplification really was the biggest thing for how we drove this forward, and then to get to some more tactical change management training pieces.

Our goal was to simplify, so we also wanted to use as many out-of-the-box functionality and connectors as possible. And when you do that, the Gainsite University has great training there already. So you're able to direct them to some really good training that already exists. We also listened to our CSMs, and was like, "What kind of training do you guys want and don't want?" They're like, "Well, we don't want what you usually give us." Well, we do like it's, we're not idiots, we know we can click and navigate our way through a tool.

Like we don't need a one-hour training on how to do that, give us a quick reference guide, and maybe a two-minute video just to see what it looks like, and that's it. Don't make us sit through a training. So we took a whole different direction on how to enable, and we would put it on the SharePoint, this change was made, here's your quick reference guide, here's a video, and keep moving forward. And it really saved just a lot of time, and it quickened adoption of really simple things, right?

And that freed up time for Brian and Austin and some others to really dig into the why, give those real customer examples when we weren't spending our time on kind of the more mundane. Well, these are professionals, right? So we were able to shift that effort and really spend our time more strategically. I love that analogy of behind every complaint is a wish, because I think it really makes sense, right?

You probably heard a lot of complaining, why did you change this? We like it this way. Right. And if you go underneath that to what is the wish behind it?

What's the ask? What do you want? That's the real thing. I know my wife wishes I do the dishes more often.

Yes. Question in the back, yeah. You might have to get a, we'll try to listen. I'm going to repeat that for the recording.

So do you guys have a journey map so that CSMs can see kind of how they use all the tools along a customer journey? I'll take that. So in side by side, in parallel to Project Brightside, we were also creating our customer success methodology, which aligns to our customer journey map who the person who owns our journey map actually is sitting next to Annie, Emily in the second row. So the answer is, it is part of our strategy.

Do we have one now that we're actively using? It's in development. So that's definitely the direction that we're going because we do want our processes to exist within the workflow that gets them to those moments that matter. And we're doing this because it right because it aligns to the customer's journey that also gets pulled from the sale cycle and everybody's all connected.

So that's, you know, that's the holy grail. So great question. Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to ask one more question and I'm going to request to state one sentence answer.

I know that'll be hard. We'll have Brian go last. So if you guys for those, we, there were a few in here that were just starting their journey, right? Trying to maybe learn from things that not to do, which is a great way to learn.

So if you could design your Gainsight environment from scratch today, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently? Kristy? Oh man, can I go last? I got Brian to go last.

Sorry. I guess I'll go first. Jumping on the ground. I appreciate it.

Maybe like two, two and a half sentences. I think the first thing you need to ask yourself is why did you purchase the platform itself? What were you trying to resolve? I think that's a big piece.

And then also how do you interact with your customers and how do you want your CSX team to interact with your customers? I think those are like the two things I'm like, what you're trying to solve. Love it. If it doesn't come up in customer conversations, does it really need to be there?

You really need to evaluate a lot of those things to just make sure you're getting the right information into Gainsight. You can also develop all the reports and all that to get what you need to do. But if it doesn't come up in customer conversation, it doesn't need to be there. Great.

I guess I'll answer now. And my answer is clouded because of her question honestly. I really still feel very passionately about aligning to our customer journey. And I would love to start there.

So that would be my answer, I guess. And not that you asked for it, but Gainsight CSM's perspective would be don't try to use the features. Figure out what you're trying to achieve. What are the metrics you're trying to hit?

What are the leading indicators to get you there? And what are the activities that you believe support those leading and lagging indicators? And then design the solution to fit that? Don't just come and ask, how should we use success plans?

That's what I would tell you as your CSM. So thank you, everyone. Thank you, guys. This was so much fun.

I'm so glad we did this. I'll go ahead and do the little housekeeping at the end because I'm already up here with the mic and I've been doing this all the last two days anyway. So please give us some feedback on the session. We'd love to know what you thought.

So you can, if from the agenda of the session, you can fill out a survey, give us feedback, go visit the puppies of Pulse and enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you so much, everyone.