Gainsight CSM: Ask Me Anything
Every wanted to pick the brain of a Gainsight CSM? Join us for a panel Gainsight CSMs from various segments to Ask Me Anything!
I'm gonna do because I talked a lot in the last one.
I'm gonna, a little bit, I'm gonna ask some questions.
However, and also as well, just from a comfortability
and access to the questions, they will be shown here.
So what we would like to do is make this very interactive.
And this is awesome.
A, y'all are just sticking it out.
Look at this, this is great.
- Yeah.
- Oh no, you're not leaving, are you?
Okay, I was about to say.
(laughing)
All right, well, I like this ratio.
It's like one to one.
- Yeah, intimate.
- Okay, so really, this is as open ended as,
we want this to be as open as it can be, right?
Similar to our previous session, we want y'all to be able
to engage with us at a level on being real about
how we leverage the tool, challenges we see,
because at the end of the day,
whether we're all using gain site or not,
we're all CSMs in that sense.
Well, I trust there's no more leaders in here, anything.
But at the end of the day as well,
we all share a lot of the same challenges,
a lot of the same struggles and a lot of the same desires
and outcomes that our customers want.
So here in that from us and being able to address
specific questions that y'all have is, I think, very valuable.
So thank you for sticking it out.
But I tell you what, my colleagues,
I'll have them introduce themselves.
And I will, y'all just hand it over to Rish.
- Okay, I'll start.
I think I know most of you here,
but I am Rishi Eamier team.
I handle mid-market accounts mostly.
I'm based out of India, but I do work closely
with the Eamier team.
So I'm just part of the team.
And so glad to be here.
- Awesome, US region.
And I've been at Gainsite for three years
and I love to dance and travel,
so we can always connect on that too.
(laughs)
- Harry Carroll, a manager of customer success,
part of the Eamier team, same as Rish.
I've been at Gainsite for two years,
but prior to joining Gainsite,
I was actually one of our customers.
So I was sat in the seats where you are right now.
And now I've gone full circle
to join the incredible team at Gainsite.
So looking forward to your questions today.
- And I guess it is well too.
We don't even necessarily need to use the app.
- In real talk, like I feel,
the sound of my own voice just bugs.
- Let's throw it out.
(laughs)
- You wanna kill the microphones.
I'm completely fine with that too.
But Nate Bartlett, in case y'all haven't,
in case I haven't introduced myself to you,
Nate Bartlett, senior enterprise CSM.
Been at Gainsite for a little over three years now.
I had cornered in North Carolina.
And I'm working a strategic enterprise segment,
12 accounts, I got an extra one now
because I got an amazing teammate
who's on Matt Lee right now.
But yeah, that's a little about me.
All right, so, who's got a question?
- Questions.
- Yes sir.
- So we're acquiring Gainsite's January.
One of the things, 'cause a lot of this is,
the customers have come up in a lot of healthcare,
government, government, military, law enforcement, more.
Have you any of the customers in the profile
and what's the challenges that they face
when trying to integrate Gainsite?
- I'm trying to think I don't work with that.
- I have a conversation.
So we work, sorry.
- Sorry.
- Sorry.
- Sorry.
- Cool.
So I work for a current, both our facility and asset lifestyle.
So management across government, military, nuclear.
So we've got a whole bunch.
I don't specifically work with, I work healthcare
and hospitals, but we have a lot of the manufacturing side
of it and we are so earlier, I've used Gainsite before,
but we implemented it in my current company,
I think it was June, Harry.
- Yeah, a few months back.
- Yeah, a few months back.
So June time.
- The customer profile just wondering
if anyone's got through that sort of similar journey
and what sort of challenge they face specific to that industry?
- I guess, not from a Gainsite perspective,
but I mean, our customers,
because it's heavily regulated in the US,
it's what data we can actually get.
And then a lot of those industries,
just because I am based in a Mia,
but I work with 100% US based.
So some of it is a security risk
that they don't necessarily want people outside.
- Dayholders is quite a big challenge from us.
I formed part of a scale team
that was actually implemented at the beginning of this year.
And most of the year, not from a Gainsite,
because it's been amazing.
And I can obviously say that,
because I've been through two implementations with Gainsite,
but it was just the general data that we have on tap
from our Salesforce Terrible.
Which everybody will know.
The visibility--
- I said no one else.
- Yes, no, no, no.
The general visibility, though,
across the organization,
was because you've got AEs,
as they always do doing their sales,
they're doing their own thing.
Part of the customer lifecycle,
the renewals, they do their own thing.
Our PS organize,
it's the biggest challenge I've had coming into this organization
is the siloedness of it.
But we're trying to break down that barrier.
And we can show that to senior level,
to the other departments,
and how that works for us has been pretty good.
- Is your small direction on Web Salesforce?
- Bi-directional,
and that was a big request because I have,
it makes no sense to me,
but I've got BDRs that are contacting existing customers.
Which again, makes no sense to me,
on why BDR would contact my customer.
But I can't see that.
Now, I couldn't see it now
because of the bi-directional integration API.
But previously,
I would have to go scrolling through Salesforce
and I don't have that time.
- So.
- Whereabouts are you guys based?
- UK.
- OK, well.
- Hang it out.
- Here we go.
- I'm just gonna get a new strategy.
My shooting.
- OK.
- Yeah.
- Well, you've already made a connection right now.
- Yeah.
- So, thank you for Pascal,
for sharing that.
- Do you have UK CSMs as well,
so they work with UK government as well?
- Yeah, even with the mayor, the government,
that's another question most likely for you.
How are you actually going with,
I don't like that.
I'm sorry.
- You don't need it.
- How are you actually going for
tackling contacting customers
out of Gainside by email with GDPR,
double opt-in and stuff like that,
which is of course for us out.
It's a public sector, more problem.
How are you tackling that?
- Yeah.
- How do you get everybody to do double opt-in?
- I think it's super important.
One thing we've noticed recently with a lot of customers,
you know, in that sector,
is that you really need to get the CIO
and the CISO on the side pretty early, right?
Because we have seen organisations
that don't necessarily consider IT or security
to be like a big stakeholder,
when actually, in fact, they really are,
and you know that, right?
So I would say that when it comes to building a business case,
when it comes to, you know,
stakeholder alignment,
making sure that you have a really strong exec sponsor,
you really do need to ensure that you're aligned
across the C-suite.
So it's not just the CFO and the CIO
and the CCO that you've got to persuade,
it's actually the rest of the Zech team as well.
So that's what I've seen in my experience,
that you really need to get that solid bind from IT.
- GDPR are compliant.
Or is it only a sector?
Are all your customers GDPR compliant?
Or is it only a service?
- We have different kinds of areas as well,
so we have, we come right, should I ever say?
- Yeah, okay.
- That's completely different,
but in Europe, we are really low-stincest
in regards, especially in Germany,
it's a bigger problem.
On the effort, it's like a challenge for us
to actually be able to reach out to a lot of customers.
If we want to automate processes
by using Gainside and different steps
and except for one party and other purposes,
where we want perhaps to tackle even whatever,
it's actually not possible.
That's one of the challenges that we would.
- Yeah, that makes sense.
- With the Stake.ai stuff,
where that data is located in terms of data center location
as well, because each country has different things,
well, this one must be in West,
your West too, or we're not in the point.
- Yeah, there's a lot of them from the customer.
- That makes sense.
- Chance customer success manager at Veeam,
I don't know if you know us.
- Yeah, fuck it.
- Make our application disaster recovery,
so they do a contact with the customers
regarding GDPR because they are,
and they are because the data,
which they are connected to us,
are pretty sensitive and very,
GDPR is solid on the basis,
so they are sometimes not allowed to share this with us.
Even we have our internal systems,
which are pretty safe.
So I'm working with the customers on the way that,
there need to be always someone in their house
who to share this outside their walls.
So maybe, I don't know if you have like,
or maybe you, some similar situations,
how to interact with such a, let's say,
eight keepers from the customer side, or.
(laughing)
- I think we have the same problem.
- We probably have the same problem,
is that every organization has the same person
with a different level of knowledge,
and a different level of how comfortable they are
with their data being shared.
That's our product, we have a lot of people
who have not done any data sharing.
There's some that almost has to come over
because they have our product,
because they're basically calling to request something,
but there's a lot of opt-out.
So in terms of being able to present back in EBR,
like usage data and customer journey,
it's quite difficult for us.
So a lot of time we're probably gonna have to look
at a similar profile, and go,
but this is what it kind of is, but you don't know.
You want to tell us.
- I think that with the DAC market for us,
and one that we are nurturing,
and as you well know, the German Workers Council
can be challenging when it comes to those types
of conversations, right?
The AI features, you've seen over the last couple
of days staircase, and the other AI products
that we have on the roadmap,
we get asked this an awful lot,
because the customer success leader really wants it,
really, really wants it to work,
but then they have to get that internal buy-in
from security, there's a governance team,
folks that work with the German Workers Council,
and so on and so forth, to essentially persuade them
why the business need, not necessarily outweighs,
but the business need is such a great demand
that they need to consider being creative
with what you do with the data,
and anonymizing it, and so on,
and we can and do do that for our customers
in those regions with those considerations.
- Yeah, to your point, actually,
on the business need, some customers do test
like a cohort where you can,
business impact is from a growth potential,
or retention potential, and that can help
with some of the selling of the buy-in,
of the roadblock that I hear just mentioned.
Any other questions?
- Can I go into the same direction, I guess?
We're also based in Germany,
and my customers are large enterprises OEMs mostly,
and we have a very high touch approach
to customer success management,
which means I know my champions are very, very real,
I know they're goals very well,
but I cannot get any user or user statistics,
'cause I'm not allowed to track that date.
Any advice on how to get actionable,
yeah, I don't know, any actionable customer success
management steps in the way
that I would like to understand it.
- Yeah, I can add some thoughts to that.
So, something that if you have my customers
in a survey to collect more data,
so you can send a survey to your customers.
Oh, not allowed, okay, well, there we go.
- So, what we do, I do at the moment a little bit,
my help is, again, I have to almost look at the profile
of who they are, and look at similar size,
what, so I don't know if you can get any user's data
for any of yours, no cuts are meant at all,
you can't get any user's data.
So, like, for instance, three police forces,
I can look at, say, let's say Lester allow me,
I can add that to a similar size.
- I know, then I can do that, I can do one more.
- Then I'm gonna do that, I present back to them,
and go, hey look, this is what a similar size does,
this is what their kind of user,
it's what they see, this is how to improve them,
I can't see yours, will these insights helpful to you,
even though it's not yours, if they say, yeah,
then at least that conversation of, well,
I can personalize it to you if you can open up
a security conversation, yeah.
- Yeah, I think it's super important to be open,
and what are you comfortable with us knowing,
like, in terms of product telemetry,
the breadth and depth of adoption of your products,
like, if you don't have that data,
it's not the end of the world,
it's great if you do have it,
because it means your health scores will be more robust,
but you can still have a health score
that doesn't have adoption data,
and just focuses on other elements,
like, you know, stakeholder engagement,
return on investment, verified outcomes,
that they've realized with your product
and their customer experience as well.
Access to that data, but I would, you know,
just echo what's sort of been said,
and have that open conversation with your client
about, you know, what is feasible.
You've probably noticed over the last couple of days,
we've got a really small company here called SAP.
So, I mean, and yeah, so,
if they've been able to, you know,
overcome the internal challenges around governance
and privacy and security, then it is possible.
And obviously, you know, we can connect you
with those folks if it helps.
- Yeah.
- Thanks.
- Could we do you have a question?
- I know, I'm working with other CRM,
like CXM CRM, that takes a long time
to reach the organization phase,
which in Texas, sometimes we are just
to interment and allow the activities of the workflow.
Just, I was wondering from games,
I perspective how do you make sure the customers
think the value, why during the last nine months
we haven't seen anything about
homework and managementations that have lost
such challenges and other things?
- Machine power.
- Yeah, yeah, I do get to see a lot of such cases
because I've recently taken up some accounts
straight out of onboarding.
So I think whenever the implementation is starting,
it is very important to understand
why they have chosen game site
or what they actually want to achieve with it.
Now, in game site, one plus point that I've seen,
not in my previous organization as a CSM,
but here is data visibility could be the one
immediate value that they could see in game site.
So having all the data points tagged together,
because of course there are multiple tools
that any organization would be working with.
So while the implementation is going on,
right after it, they see all the data at one place
and that is like the immediate success,
that we expect as a CSM that when I'm getting an account,
this should actually be there
and then we try to build up on top of it.
Another thing to mention is whenever the sales team
and the implementation team, they're scoping out
the work, I think they do put in so many features in place
that somehow or the other by the end of the project,
all those things are closed off.
For example, scorecard is one such feature.
It is part of the scope of course implementation team
would do it, customer would see it.
Once it is done, you get entire holistic view
of your account tell, which is like a big win
for some of the customers who have never seen it before.
Some of the features that we already,
we have right now, corelage directly to the value
like scorecard, dashboards, timeline entries,
if you've got congress, home integration within the timeline,
every meeting that you have been taken
comes in automatically to gain sight
and they don't have to do anything
or they don't have to reply to different leaders
if they ask this question that what has been going on
in that particular accounts.
So those things are immediate next value
and if you're asking about how about the time
of implementation mostly there,
so I think each customer would also understand
the complexity of their use case
and this is one expectation setting
that should be done always from the very beginning itself.
That this is the timeline we are going to just lose
all the nine months and see nothing by the end of it,
that is where the frustration would arise.
But then again, having a good timeline,
stakeholder pay and from the very beginning,
having the staircase meeting in between
just to see the track of the progress
and both customer and ourselves
being equally held accountable
for the project success is the way to go.
Yeah.
With the customer?
Yeah.
Okay, that's a nice question.
So success, once the customer signs the deal,
there are two, three things that happens.
One is value map survey,
wherein we ask what are the end objectives
that you want to achieve with K-Insight
and in CS Engine, the expansion as a goals.
We have it recorded then.
Now throughout the implementation,
the implementation team tries to tie the features
back to some of our template,
I suggest plan with all of these information already in it,
that your customer initially wanted to start with retention
as the key focus area.
And then during my first meeting
or the kickoff meeting with them,
I asked them that are these goals still valid
because a lot can change within six, seven months, right?
So then that's where we start with,
but then for days of work, we do get those templates
from what customer has for the prior.
I would say that the success plan
shouldn't start with the customer success manager.
It should start with the salesperson,
the solution consultant,
for they're even a customer, right?
So obviously they're a prospect,
they're considering purchasing your technology.
If you've got a really slick pre-sales process,
those people should be capturing goals,
outcomes, objectives, metrics,
and being able to quantify that
with a value proposition for your technology.
And then in an ideal world,
when that prospect becomes a customer,
that is then handed over from the pre-sales team
to the onboarding team.
And as we all know,
'cause we're in customer success,
onboarding is the most critical phase
of the customer journey.
And if that handoff is done correctly,
then it's just a validation during that onboarding process
of this is why you're in the sales cycle,
and you're just validating that back to the customer.
And now we're gonna take on a journey,
and we're gonna onboard you,
and we're gonna have quick time to value,
and you're gonna have a great experience.
And then again, the process doesn't stop there,
that has to be handed over to this dozen, we know that.
But if all of that worked perfectly, as a CSM,
you should be inheriting a success plan
with all of those elements included,
and it's a bit more context from your customer.
And I tell you right now that your customer
will think that you are the best possible vendor.
If you go to them in that first meeting,
that first kickoff meeting,
and they're not telling you why they bought your solution,
you're telling them and just asking for validation.
- On that one then, do you,
I think it's from games I expected,
do you have sale of a list of,
like I know you have different bolts onto your product,
you just have like a generic list of,
this is why people buy our product.
And then your pre-sales team solution architects are going,
one more, more, more, more, more, more,
and it goes over to you.
That's pretty much how it happens.
And their slide solutions overview within comes soon.
You go, yeah, I know where they've got it then.
That's how you work.
- That's exactly that.
So we have the notion of value drivers,
and we've determined that there are four key value drivers.
There's probably a lot more than that,
but we've condensed it down into these four facets.
And with it each value driver,
there are goals, outcomes and objectives.
It's actually called our value dean already,
but it's about being very prescriptive with,
these are the value drivers that most organizations
want to solve for when it comes to buying
a customer success platform like GainSci.
And value drivers,
and then understanding how are you going to quantify success,
how are you going to measure success,
and what are the metrics outcomes.
So yes, we do have that mapped out,
and it's part of our value realization framework.
- And to add to that, from an operational perspective,
we have all of those fields and sales force,
so they're required fields now,
where the salesperson, as soon as they close the deal,
they have to select the goals.
And once the deal is closed,
that's when the automation happens,
where a success plan is created with all of those objectives,
which I love.
- And they're not quite as an opportunity
until that's done then, is it like a barrier?
So you can't, like, it's 90%,
so I know this has to be done.
- It has to be done.
- It has to be done.
- Yeah, I love it.
It's, and it saves time, because--
- But that's just so bad.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
And all of the, usually salespeople
has a like a medic formula too.
So all of those know all of the information
without having to write it myself,
or without having to go into sales force.
- Just a few years from just on the ladies' first question
about pigmentation and the time period,
where you can show that,
we were doing it this year,
one of the big highlights,
and my previous organization,
were two really distinct differences
on why it was successful.
We set up a sandbox,
and therefore you can show that use back
by using the sandbox and what the team can actually do.
And I was on the wall,
he, you know, he's always looking for the thing on the wall.
So it wasn't until we got this signed off,
and I was part of the UAT, the Steer Coaster,
I got to buy first time and giving that feedback,
until we were happy,
and we only then moved to the next phase,
we were happy.
And through the process,
we were able to feedback on,
try the timeline, try a success plan,
try whatever, try to break the system,
previously on the organization beforehand,
where it was kind of set up,
but it was really badly.
And the other benefit was,
is we had CSOps in this organization,
and that'd been a huge driver to how I didn't work.
No, no, it didn't work,
it was failing in the company.
'Cause then you lose adoption from your CSMs,
you can't teach all thoughts and you're tricks,
they're not wanting to keep their Excel documents
with five years worth of success plans.
And as soon as you buy into it,
you're being sold as converted,
it just makes my life so much easier.
I think it's--
The value around, sorry,
the value around the UAT,
that POC, before you sign onto it,
you've got to make sure that it's going to be 100% right,
and make sure you try and break it
in your organization with all that data.
And the second thing is that your data's going to be clean
to come in,
'cause I were UAT at the first,
but it was our data,
it's not the UAT,
we just took the data from our Salesforce and Sandbox,
and put it into the Sandbox,
and the data was better.
So any data versus owning as good as the data
that goes into it, so.
- True.
- Super important, what Pascal mentioned right there,
in that you bring the team along with you on the journey.
So leading the charge and doing it on his own,
he brought the rest of the team
and the rest of the organization along on that journey.
And I think it's super important that you do that,
because then it's collaborative,
and it means that you have more stakeholders,
and potentially more cross-functional teams
that potentially will have a use case one day.
Maybe not initially with the MVP,
but at some point you would hope
that it isn't just custom success that uses it,
but it's sales, it's marketing,
it's product, it's the executive team.
And if you bring the team along on that journey with you,
you're more likely to see success.
One thing that you might consider doing
is building like a steering group,
a steering committee, a Tiger team,
a cross-functional group of individuals.
I like to call them adoption champions,
and select one from every part of the organization.
So have someone from sales,
someone from marketing,
obviously a number of folks from customer success,
even to my earlier point, IT, right?
Have them as a key stakeholder,
and that group should meet on a regular basis
and make decisions on the governance of the strategy
and what you're hoping to achieve.
- Given indication I was set up for adoption champion,
we had three CS directors VP,
I mean the VP had already involved
and he did a couple things,
but it was three CS directors,
two three enterprise CSMs,
revops, I was the only scale person
that had really been through the UAT of it.
And now we meet,
we still got perspective with me every Tuesday.
What's it mean to talk about,
obviously what's working, what's not working,
what's coming down the line,
and then we've kind of pulled out the roadmap
of what we want to do in K-SAT.
- I have a question.
Do you have a risk to assist management
and how do you approach to,
- Yeah, I guess I think we can all add some framework
and we use our CTAs to track the risk types
and reasons that we have with our customers.
And it allows us to give some good reporting
into the trends of risks that our customers are having.
So that way we can bring in those different departments
where we have the most risks.
So if we have lots of risks, CTAs will churn,
we're able to see some reporting there for the leaders
to bring in those stakeholders.
And we also have reporting where we can escalate those risks
and allow meeting where we bring those up
for any potential churns that are coming up for renewal.
I don't know if anyone wants to add anything additional
to that.
- I'm just curious,
if you're ultimately clear,
what's the difference between
the like, a close-on company,
so it's different to the city?
- So there's a form of automation
and there's a form of manual.
The company for a different company,
there's not gonna be a stakeholder anymore.
I would track that manually as a risk CTA.
But if you were to submit an MPS survey to say,
zero, I hate gain site, it's made my life horrible,
then that would be an automated risk CTA
that I would get that I can act on as well.
- We also have those for adoption as well.
So, you know, we have the notion of healthy active users
here at gain site, 10 or more times in the last 28 days.
And if that drops below a certain threshold,
the CSM will receive a proactive alert to say,
"Hey, your customer over here,
"their adoption has dropped 30%
"or whatever it is in the last week.
"You need to go and do something about that."
So we have the ability to raise risks ourselves
based on conversations we have with customers,
but also gain site tells us, Pinterven.
- CTA, via the CTA.
- Yeah, within gain site and via email, you can set.
- Can you ask her about what she owned?
Amazing.
Can you just ask, so this is the best specific I've managed?
And how you designed a specific type of dictionary
and how much gain site is flexed to your--
- So we have a pooled model right now
where we have a group of CSMs who manage our skilled segment.
And so depending on the notifications that they get,
they're the ones who act on it or own that risk.
- One customer, how much skill customers
do you want to get them on the manage?
Like do you have-- - On an average,
what would be the number?
- It's a pooled model.
So in our, it's not a segment
because digital customer success is a strategy,
not a segment, but in that pooled model,
we have a number of CSMs, but they're not named seal.
And they will use gain site in the same way
as we do as high-touch CSMs,
but obviously over a wider,
you know, kind of cohort of customers if you like.
So they have the same level of automation built in as we do,
but obviously we do have to build out programs,
journeys both within the app, within gain site itself,
and via email and other ways
to ensure that we are engaging with those customers
on a regular basis.
- So, (mumbles)
- Yeah. - Like anyone in the company,
- I'll take that out.
- Okay, so yeah, that's a really nice question
to get interested in a nice topic,
but yes, first of all, we have got one deal,
one email address where all our customers,
pool customers can reach out to us for.
So there are two things here.
One is reactive approach.
Whenever the customer tries to connect for something,
our pool CSM team, they're there to help, then and there.
That's one.
Coming to the more proactive or the recurring cadences,
there are certain webinars on adoption,
on sharing best practices that our team does.
Okay, so they do one too many webinars,
just to explain, let's say digital CS
is a trending topic right now, right?
So what has been happening across the industry?
That is one type of webinar.
Second is how can you technically do it within gain site?
So those one too many webinars are being held,
and the attendance of that is also recorded
as how much engaging your customer is with you.
So they also kind of get to know how their customers
are trending when it comes to engagement.
Second thing that our pool CSMs are doing is collective EBR.
So they have a very good process of collecting value
that they have seen in gain site in a very automated way,
and then they try to collaborate some customers
of the same industry are with similar use case
who are ready to discuss them,
so that it's a very good networking channel as well.
At the same time they do see that,
okay this customer in the same industry
has been very successful with risk management,
let's learn from that.
So that's how some of the cadences are right now.
- That's really great.
So one pool, one seed time,
we'll just have a network for like a big meeting
for multiple customers,
that's connected with the other.
- Yeah, with similar sharing,
that chaotic thing.
Yeah, you have to monitor,
and more to read that somehow.
- Yeah, it was really interesting.
- Thank you, I just want you to bring about a strategic
approach and a touch for a little bit.
- No.
- Yeah.
- Thank you.
Sorry.
- Thank you.
- Thank you.
- One more, thanks.
- 'Cause I am the scale.
So that's what we've done this year.
I'll, we've got a couple of files in the cards,
but so 350 sit within that tag of strategic enterprise.
Makes up a significant part of the business revenue.
I was brought in among seven other scaled CSNs.
- Okay.
- I identified around 700 accounts,
so we are currently one to 100.
All based on solution,
so again, those solutions cover different vertical,
so I'm completely health care,
but I cover two different solutions within healthcare.
We've got other customers who are...
(audience member speaking off mic)
- Got it?
- I'm a customer of the money.
- I've got a hundred and sixty at the moment.
But, I mean, our goal for 25 is a digital,
a digital motion, which we're rolling out.
And that will be probably a pooled model.
But, I would say, we have introduced,
and that's part of the success of the RevOps.
I mean, the CSOps is having bought in the workflows
that we can now, so we have things like
renewals that are necessarily automated
if there's risk to raise our own risk as well.
But, one thing I can take away from actually
from Dan's session this morning, which is really good,
is with a hundred and sixty accounts,
you can't do a hundred and sixteen customer success plans.
It makes no sense.
And there's no point of doing a tick box,
one for mistake.
And I'm actually one of my goals as a,
my performance goals for the company
is every account needs a success plan.
But then, you think to yourself,
well, it's a tick box exercise.
'Cause I've got customers that are...
I know that they're very happy.
They're using the solution.
They, you know, there's no risk of churn.
They don't need a success plan, you know,
but they are growth opportunities.
So I can set a goal to say new UI plan
for broken down.
So there's different ways of doing it.
If you want to connect, I'm important.
- Yeah, I'll just...
- What did you connect after?
- It was a question.
- It's all about...
- Have there been connections made during...
- I love that.
- This is awesome.
- Come on, stay tuned.
(all laughing)
(all laughing)
- Have you ever mentioned Georgia?
- Well, that's her pub.
I was gonna...
(all laughing)
- Yeah, absolutely.
We can connect after this.
(all laughing)
- So that kind of talk to what I was gonna ask about
was around more around with you guys
and your book of business.
The customer base that you have,
how is it that you are identifying actually,
this is say like, in my entire life,
this is how many strategic accounts I've got.
Actually, when they reach a certain point of maturity,
how should I back off, when should I back off,
and all of field accounts or mid-sides,
how do you balance that?
Is it a game site or...?
- It can be.
I think obviously, as CSM's,
we have to be quite nimble and quite agile,
and you will have a book of business
which is constantly changing,
so you'll have customers that are downselling,
upselling, cross selling, hopefully not churning.
So it will be changing a lot,
and it may be that also you decide as an organization
that you're gonna change your segmentation model,
which is something that we've done at GainSight ourselves,
is looking at what are the variables
that you use for segmentation.
Is it ARR?
Is it opportunity?
Are they a sexy logo?
It will be.
So I think it's important to consider those variables,
like segmentation,
but in terms of prioritization and where you spend your time,
I mean, I'm not speaking for us.
I look at opportunity, I look at the renewal date,
the ARR, and also the health score.
So those are like five things that I will,
when I look at my book of business,
I will, 'cause if you've got 20, 30, 40 customers,
whatever it is, you're not gonna speak with all of them.
- I have to move because every three days
you'll be doing the EBR.
- Unless you wanna work weekends and evenings,
which no one wants to.
- No, no.
- But to Harry's point,
you can set that up in a dashboard.
So I think we'll push a period of one.
- Oh no, so it's George, you're on the whole day,
in the earlier session, half to my dashboard.
We work doing a lot of work around the home at the moment,
but I'll go there, I'll see, you know,
renewals that don't have a forecast date,
delay, or if they're, if I've gone on PTO,
whatever they've been delayed, CTAs that they need,
or TAS, that need to be done.
So there's different, the metrics that we track on our,
you know, but health scores definitely one of them
on the dashboard.
And then I know, proactively,
with contact with the customer in 45 days,
is an example of why I have an eye.
There's just nothing to speak to them about,
but I'm also not gonna re-charge them
for the sake of reeking onto them.
- Mm-hmm.
- But then I can also see about the tickets,
you know, how many tickets have they raised out?
- Yeah, no.
- Two months.
And then I know that if they've raised nothing,
is there an issue?
- Yeah, so this is where, again,
for this jet here, by sound, it comes with an issue
where we don't see it.
So even because we're not able to get the data
around like the everyday usage,
or essentially to end customer usage,
and that is the challenge of the last.
- So the solution to my solution that I inherited
was to have taken over about 85% of my portfolio.
Don't ask me why, but that tool
doesn't integrate into our users' tool.
So I can't see 10 or 12 modules within it,
but I can't see where they've been in their time.
I know from speaking to my customers
where they've been in their time,
but I can't track their usage.
So again, because we've implemented the new scale team,
and it's not a, you know, obviously,
game size has been great with that,
because we can see what's happening.
However, I inherited 160 accounts,
that probably have never had a CSM before,
or they've always had sales
trying to put something down their throats.
They may hear from a renewal rip once, you know,
once in five years, but outside of that,
we knew nothing about that that account.
And that comes to your point that you can get the data.
Once you have the data, you can log it on.
But again, the data is only as good as what you're putting
into game size.
Or any, any, any.
- And again, that's your challenge.
We're probably putting a lot of subjective gut feeling data
of we've maybe had a competition one on two end users.
We haven't got a wide access to the customer,
and we're not getting objective,
statistic based data coming out of it.
- So how are you tracking like tickets?
So you want technical tickets?
- So again, it depends.
So a lot of our customers can be very technical
and will sell, sold things.
- Yeah.
- And they won't want us to know what they're doing.
Could it involve data, targets, natural security,
or law enforcement around live cases,
and they don't want us to know.
So they will use technical people
in their own organizations to try and sell the sold.
Or alternatively, they will go through,
say, a trusted reseller, who they will go to,
and then the reseller will almost blank.
- Yeah, okay.
- Thing, like, obviously, you can generate advice
that there's nothing for them,
which isn't necessarily usable for us.
And we can't attribute that,
because their bucket business is maybe 30 end customers.
- Yeah.
- And if it is, yeah, it makes sense.
- Can't, so for some things,
but there's always a chance around it.
- I think it's important to use what you do have access to.
And there's gonna be a lot that you're not gonna have
in terms of visibility, but crawl, walk, run
is what we say against it.
And you guys did exactly the same, right?
So just use what you do have and try and be creative.
- Like engagement, like if you're starting to track
your engagement meetings and can say,
we use that as a health score metric.
You can prioritize which,
or if you have customers taking training courses
or attending webinars, those are other ways
to start inputting some of the data points
that you do have.
- Very nice point.
- Absolutely.
- Yeah, my previous organization was,
there was a bit like a lot of ways.
There was no dashboards.
You, you know, see a center kind of left
of their own devices by using the system.
Again, I kind of found myself being there
like a power user, and I just threw myself
into learning gamesite.
But, and even then we didn't,
I took about the amount of data that we put access
to now and try and put it in there.
And with my previous organization,
if we even tried, like we could have done it,
but we just had no CSO or whatever tickets in there
and then the CSM can manage it.
But then you are going, 'cause I had access to
my previous organization that we had,
like we were using JIRA for support.
- So yeah, we have it for future question bugs.
So again, we have that.
- Yeah, and then, but it was a CSM's job
when the ticket got raised, you got a thousand emails
just from JIRA or Confluence because of that.
But when I know that I can go into my dashboard
and gamesite now, and I can see that the customer,
or I've seen that I've got to combine 15 tickets
that have been raised in the last 28 days,
I just click on that and I can see you in my customers off.
But then I can also see a lag.
So if something's taken longer than 15 days
or whatever the metric is,
technical support and why it's not been done,
you know, why is that ticket not been closed?
- Do you, do you integrate your CSO or JIRA
into your gamesite then around things like your status changes
from let's say being considered to targeted it?
- Ticketing park for basic customers that they're just raised,
they send it to us called support
or some solutions have a designated email
that they consider ticket through.
- Well, we have them to put requests in the unit track,
but from a, if someone comes in and says,
I've got a bug to technical support,
I say it's one of the customers who does,
and the technical goes, it's not a bug,
it's feature quest, I've scored it,
it's gone off to be reviewed,
so it goes into the world of JIRA and stuff.
It's more that once it goes there,
sometimes it's lost and it's the ability to track it
in games, so we can kind of hope it,
we can be able to do,
- Yeah, there's an integration.
- Yeah, we can do it.
- Yeah, we can do it.
- Oh, targeted in release.
- All right, yep.
- Proactive playbook, alpha customer, hey.
- Mm-hmm.
- People are doing it.
- Yeah.
- Sure.
- By the way, Pascal, we need you on the stage
in Dublin next year.
- Come on up.
- Dublin next year.
You're gonna host a session, right?
- Yeah, give me a free secret, I'll be there.
- You got free ticket if you're a secret.
- This is being recorded.
- So you're gonna track it as well.
- You can wear it if you want.
- You can wear it if you want.
(laughing)
- There's not any way you guys know where I am.
Yeah, I mean, I, like I said, we can connect to a client
and you know, pretty up-coordinate a couple of biggest
(laughing)
we have principal CSAs and stuff that just,
that haven't quite poured into that idea.
And one of the biggest takeaways I'm taking back
to my organization,
'cause it's not CS that needs to buy in.
- Very good.
- It's new, it can be the whole thing.
- We need to educate the rest of the business
on what CS can do,
and we can have what we've been brought into you.
And that's been a big challenge.
It's been 100% of the challenge,
I'm not gonna sugarcoat it,
but when they can start seeing what we've achieved
at scale just this year alone,
where the goal was seven hundred accounts
and I think the whole,
a pretty good effort that most of us
only got our book of business probably March time.
- Yeah.
- So eight months.
And that was most of those were coal going,
seven and one, five, seven and M were,
oh no, we fine, we don't, you know,
thanks for contacting us,
we'll contact you in three months time.
But, you know, I need it.
You know, I mostly do, I quite like visibility
on what my accounts are doing,
and, but then I have an internal issue
because I have people that are not important
to keep a CSM in loop.
And then I suddenly get an email from a customer going,
oh, can you help us with this?
I was like, which of this conversation happened?
- Yeah.
- But that again,
when you start having,
to Harry's point me,
you got everybody else involved, sales, marketing,
'cause I also, I use,
my previous organization,
I think we used Gengside,
our marketing team used Gengside for NPS,
which was great.
And we tried to,
and I've been telling the business,
my current business now,
use it because you know,
your contacts are there,
you can fundamentally clean up those contacts.
And we use it,
but we use a completely different tool for NPS this year.
I think,
I can't even tell you the response rate was,
I mean, it was--
- We're literally starting in,
I think in January a company-wide branding exercise
to go around and go,
"Hey, we're moving against our,
"this is what CSE is,
"this is how we help,
"this is what we want from you,
"this is what you can expect from us
"to just try and kind of align everything
"as we go through this."
- I guess that's good to notify them,
but what I would say is,
you tell them what the benefit
that they're gonna get.
So when CS Pro-Pilot,
I'd be telling them--
- We're gonna,
we're gonna--
- We love them.
- Give everyone big questions.
- Let's do it.
