No Handoff Left Behind: Using CS Intelligence to Drive Renewals, Expansion, and Team Continuity

All right. Hello, everyone. Hello. We're going to be introducing ourselves because this is the last session of the day, and we're really going to get you guys excited about it.

With that, can everyone stand up for a second? I have some of my customers in here and you guys are really feeling the energy today. So love that already. This is not the icebreaker, by the way.

This is just a little bit of a warm-up. So, who's having fun? My name is Eric Lynn. I am an account manager here at Gainsight.

My name is Kelly Egan. I am also an account manager here at Gainsight. We've both been here a little over four years. Yeah.

Right? Around the same time? Yeah. And the reason why I ask you to stand up is because I want you to turn to your neighbor, give them a high five, and say your favorite thing about Pulse so far.

[LAUGHTER] A couple deep breaths. Yeah. Yeah. You can also be like in my side.

Yoga instructor. What? OK, we're good. You guys can sit down.

I just want to get you guys some blood flowing in the legs. We've probably been sitting all day, right? Perfect. So in traditional Gainsight fashion, if you guys have been a Gainsight customer for a while, we love a good icebreaker.

So let's just say it's a Friday afternoon, a customer email saying they're reassessing their relationship. You're deep in the jungle. Does CS grab the machete? Or does an account manager leave the expedition?

Shout it out. We want to hear you. Ooh. Ooh.

OK. Really? OK. Oh, OK.

Anyone else? OK. Fair. Fair.

Anyone else? Any more expeditions? No. OK.

That's cool. Tough crowd. This isn't my first rodeo talking jumbling faces. Anyways.

A little bit more about us. So we are two seasoned explorers navigating the Gainsight jungle by bringing at least four years of experience-- at least, I shouldn't say that at least-- but in commercial instinct and a well-worn cookbook collection to every expedition. And yes, we do have a cookbook club, if anyone would like to join. Perfect.

So just a kind of brief agenda here. So we're going to be looking at the cost of four handoffs. So why broken CS to AM transitions lose deals and erode trust, servicing the right stakeholders and signals, so using relationship intelligence and heat maps to catch risk before it's too late. Relationship intelligence with staircase AI, which is obviously, I'm sure, what you guys have heard a lot of these past few days.

So capturing history, sentiment, and engagement. So institutional knowledge survives team changes. And then lastly, aligning CS and account managers around real expansion. So we work very closely with our CS counterparts.

But how can we use our tools to our advantage? So shared data, clear ownership, and proven frameworks to drive-- oh my gosh-- growth together. A couple more key takeaways here. So surfacing the right stakeholders and signals with CS tools.

So as account managers, how do we show up as a trusted partner, not just a seller? How are we really uncovering that relationship that we're gathering from the CSM, but then also with the overall relationship? So looking at history, sentiment, and engagement data, so no institutional knowledge disappears during any sort of team transitions. And then ultimately, aligning CS and account managers around shared renewal and expansion goals without account health data and real examples of uncovered opportunities.

And we'll be showing some real stuff along the way of what we've seen, obviously. Awesome. So where are we going to start? I think when we look at transitions and we think about why is there a transition, there's a lot of different situations.

Some of it is just new book of business. Maybe you have segment changes. Maybe someone leaves. In our case, we had, what, seven babies born on our team in one year.

So we had a lot of-- You can say it. Holy shit. Yeah. And so we had to really figure out as a team, and I think every team faces this, where do we start with this challenge?

And so first is going to be stakeholders. Where is there any possible risk? Where is the renewal? At what point are we in that cycle?

Where is the upsell if there's any sort of expansion? Then we're looking at where do we need this? We really need this to be surfaced instantly. So when we're looking historically, we want to see how did we find this out?

When was it found? And so we'll talk a little bit about how we leverage, of course, Staircase and CS to help us identify those things quickly. The next piece of it is just going to be in terms of actions. We need to make sure that any time we're taking an action with one of our customers, there's a clear priority.

We're not guessing as to why we're taking that action. We want to have a very, very clear understanding as to what we're doing. And then lastly is that change never stops. So we are constantly adopting and changing our strategy.

There's lots of change in our customers. There's change within our own company. Obviously, there's change externally. We're seeing obviously so much change in AI.

So we need to continually evolve and look at our strategy. And we do that as a team, but of course as an organization, just to make sure we're constantly refining as time goes on. So when we look at that relationship, there's really the three main pieces. We're looking at the CSM, the customer themselves, and us as account managers.

So we really, obviously, we want to partner really, really closely. I think one of the things that we do notice is that a lot of stakeholders really just want to talk to us from a commercial perspective, which is fine. But CS folks are really getting boots on the ground. They're talking to the day-to-day folks.

And I think one of the struggles that every single CS account management team runs into is that the day-to-day folks, they are probably not running the renewal. They're influencing, but they're not running the renewal. So how do we leverage those relationships to really talk to the folks who are making those decisions? And how can we get the right context so that when we as account managers do talk to those stakeholders, we come in with all the context that we've learned from the business?

And truthfully, we have to just know that sometimes-- and you all may have done this before, but clients will tell us that the sky is falling just to get free stuff. And we get that. And that's fine. But we also need to kind of filter through that and really see what's going on.

So we'll talk a lot about where do we uncover some of those opportunities. So I think overall, without that strong internal relationship between a CSM and account manager-- and obviously, this is hard as time goes on. We're making transitions. We are working with different CSMs.

We're not always aligned with the same person. If we're not strong, we're working off incomplete information. So really making sure that relationship is strong and working off the same data set, working off the same communications. So all alluding to a lot of what we're going to talk about from an operational perspective.

So starting with a real life journey, as Kelly mentioned, this idea kind of really came to us with the fact that our team this past year and a half had quite a few of us coming in and out on maternity and paternity leave. One person came in. We high five. We said, we'll see you in 20 weeks.

So we really kind of had to figure out how to adapt to make sure that you guys didn't feel this. So sometimes one of the hardest parts of the job isn't really the renewal conversation itself. It's realizing too late that you've been maybe talking to the wrong person or the champion you've built everything on quietly left the company two months ago. And that can happen, especially when you're jumping in for the first time.

Or you just got a new account and the renewal is in 90 days. By the time it shows up in your health score, you might be already behind. So we're looking at that relationship intelligence. And what I really love about how Staircase thinks about this is it's not just telling you that the account is red.

It's really servicing why things like personal change might happen, a drop in sentiment, relationship that's gone cold. It's really catching those signals weeks before they'd ever surface in maybe a traditional data source, like support tickets or product usage. And as an account manager, that's a difference between having a really proactive conversation, being like, hey, I noticed there's been some movement on your team, wanted to check in, versus getting blindsided on a renewal call when you thought that it might have been a little bit more straightforward. Just taking a pause here, is anyone utilizing GainSight Staircase today?

Yeah? Cool. So we got some more hands that need to go up later, huh? And then taking a quick look at the heat map, and this is where it gets really tactical for expansion in cross-sell, which is pretty key in what Kelly and I do.

When you're trying to grow an account, you're not just selling to one person. You're really trying to get multi-threaded, understanding different parts of the business, because ultimately customer success, yes, it's a huge part of why we're all here, but there's other parts of the business that we need to talk to that might have an idea or a position in what they're thinking about for their strategy. So the heat map makes it immediately obvious who on their side is engaged, who's gone quiet, and who you haven't reached out to yet. And you can kind of see that on this picture here with the different red, yellow, and green dots.

The matters, this matters a lot when you're going into a renewal or any conversation where your main contact is maybe more lukewarm, but they could not be more so of a decision maker. Like Kelly mentioned at the beginning, when we're talking about that CSM and account manager relationship, nine times out of 10, the CSM might be talking more to the admin, whereas when we come in, we're talking maybe more to a more high level decision maker type of question. So how do we merge those conversations together to make sure that we're aligned on the goal? So you can see, okay, there's someone over here that I haven't talked to who might be a better champion, or maybe they have different goals or different strategies that can help build out to the whole broader division.

And you wanna maybe move on that before the contract is up, not after. But the way I'm really thinking about this isn't just from a reporting tool that you're gonna check in every once a quarter. It's a thing that's really gonna tell you where to spend your time this week. So which accounts actually need attention?

Which relationships need reinforcing before you go ask for more money? And where is there actually real opportunity to expand? For those of us who really carry both a renewal and an expansion number, that's everything from really kind of figuring out where I need to prioritize my time. So something to kind of really ask yourself right now, especially for those of you who are maybe looking at staircase or gain site as a whole, do you actually know which stakeholders are at your top five accounts, for example?

And are they drifting? Do we know that? How do you know that? If not, what are you doing to action on that?

Because staircase does. And another kind of key point here, just kind of pulling out this a little bit further, is if we don't have access to multiple stakeholders, there could be a risk now and for any future renewals. I can't tell you how many times you think that there's been so many changes within accounts. There's acquisitions that happen.

How do we make sure that I'm at my stakeholder is still gonna be the person that I talk to for any sort of renewal conversations? Because we just talked about catching those early signals, the churn risk, the personnel change, the relationship that's quietly going cold, the natural next question is, okay, but where exactly is that gap? That's kind of what this view answers here. So the relationship heat map is a tactical layer underneath those signals.

So instead of just telling you something is off, it shows you the full picture. Every stakeholder on the customer side, which is, again, on the horizontal view, and then every person on your internal team, which is vertical. So exactly how strong or how weak each of those connections is based on the last 90 days. And then you can see here some relationships are green, like I mentioned in the past slide, strong and active.

Others are yellow starting to drift or a little bit more neutral. And then some are red, which means either the engagement has dropped off or there wasn't a relationship there to begin with. Maybe the interactions through email have just been on CC. And this is where we can catch the risk as early as six weeks.

From the last slide, that really becomes real actionable because you're not really making guesses anymore. You're understanding where that data's coming from. And then looking back at the renewal angle, I use this more as a gut check for my confidence level. I'm sure Kelly does the same.

If I walk into renewal thinking it's solid, but the heat map is showing me red on the economic fire and yellow on my champion, that's not really a good sign. So something I need to reevaluate when prepping for my call. Again, especially when I was meeting some of the new customers that I was watching their accounts for some of my colleagues. I was like, what's going on here?

Who can I ask? What's happening? So, and then from the flip side, expansion and cross sell. For expansion, it's telling me where I have the right to go deeper.

If I want to bring in a new product or get to a different business unit, I need relationships beyond my one main contact. They're a great person to go to, especially maybe even for that friendly, warm, hey, can you introduce me? But this is showing me who on my team or execs has already been connected to that stakeholder, where I need to build from scratch before I ask for more budget. Obviously I can't just come in and be like, hey, Billy, I need $60,000, but hey, we don't know each other yet.

And at the end of the day, the account that expanded and renew aren't always the healthiest ones. I'm sure we can relate to that. And they are the ones where you do have enough visibility before you act. Things can get hard, but this is what that visibility can look like.

You guys done with me talking yet? Cause I got a couple more slides. (laughing) Lighten the mood here a little bit. So when you see those signals, I think my boss is in here and he's probably like sit down, Eric (laughing) So should I go in to stand up?

Anyways, so now you can see the signals, you know which relationships are drifting, but then what? Risk analyst automatically investigates turn risk, explains the drivers and recommends those next steps. But what makes that different? The part that I think is most valuable for an account manager or anyone that is in similar type of function is that recommended next step.

It's not just telling you something is wrong, it's suggesting a playbook on what actually worked in similar situations before. So instead of starting from scratch every single time you have a red account, you're starting from a point that's grounded in a real potential outcome. So just to jump in on this really quickly. So I think we have a lot of customers, at least some of my customers who leverage staircase and they say to me, well, I want some action, right?

I think that's what everyone's thinking about. We're talking about agents, we're talking about like what happens from here. And I think obviously everyone has to think about change management, understanding that some of these account managers do need to be taught and trained to start to look at what this is bringing them and then be able to take action from there. So I think this evolution, we used to really just kind of see the data, see the risk and see what's going on and figure out our own actions and our own playbook.

We took it to the next level pretty recently. And I think this has been a really big game changer, at least for our team and for some of the other teams, like the CS teams, who are starting to figure out, well, what do we do based on all of these interactions and all of the sentiment and the overall kind of how lukewarm is this customer? How do we take that action based on all of those components? Yeah, and we have, like she said, we have a lot of customers that are doing this today and one of the main reasons why we want to talk to you guys today is because we see it and how can we help you guys kind of figure out what that looks like.

So one of our customers branch is actually a great example of this. Before Staircase, they were completely reactive. Churn would happen and they'd spend a lot of time kind of piecing together why that's happening after the fact. So with this risk analysis, they now see the full chain of signals that led to the customer leaving and more importantly, they catch those patterns early enough to actually do something about it, which is key.

Their team put it best. It's given us the ability to take action long before a customer reaches that decision. And then lastly, I kind of wanted to show you what this actually looks like. So this is an example.

This is a customer of mine. I wouldn't say it's a success story. As you can see, there's a lot of red. (laughing) In the traditional sense, but it's actually kind of one of the best examples of why this matters.

And again, to reiterate one of the reasons why Kelly and I wanted to chat with you a little bit further. And I know kind of looking up at this is like a little bit, so I have glasses on, I'm still like, should I go back to the eye doctor? This is not good. Well, I'm not going to read the risk word for word.

This account is really escalating out of five out of five in terms of a risk level. So procurement has formally requested that non-renewal. You can see I've had conversations with their VP already. They've confirmed that they're exiting in 2027.

You know, that's as real as it gets, plain and simple. And you can see the risk analysis has already really broken that down. And you'll see in this example here, you are seeing the risk analysis, but you're also seeing the expansion analysis, which I'm sure you guys are probably like, how is that happening? Well, that is like, even in this account, while there is risk on one piece with GainSight, as I'm sure you guys have been aware, we do have multiple products.

So the relationship that I've created with this customer is still very strong, where while the relationship is unfortunately ending on one product, there is potential for us to keep them within the GainSight family. So that's why you are seeing that expansion analysis along with the risk, where it's going to, I didn't include it a full screenshot here, but if I clicked over to the other side, you would be able to fully see the playbook associated with that expansion, which again, it's a very unique situation, but it is possible to see both. When staircases, ultimately recognizing is that the churn and the expansion are always mutually exclusive, kind of like to go back into the theme, kind of like swapping the golden idol for a bag of sand and not triggering the giant boulder, but sometimes a customer is leaving one product, but still open to another. So I like to think about this as the team that's driving the exit, again, thinking about that stakeholder relationship isn't the same team that could be benefiting from something else.

The platform doesn't always make assumptions, and it's showing the real full picture and lets you decide where to put your energy. So it's not like panic at the disco, no panic mode here, because this is structure, the account manager, which is me, is owning that formal non-renewal process, and then I've worked really closely with my CSM who kind of own that transition of planning for what does life look like after gain site, hopefully not fully after gain site, because still trying to keep them in there, but timelines are immediate, roles are very clear. Even at a loss, you're running a professional onboarding that protects the relationship for the future. And this is the part that I don't think really gets talked about enough, how you handle a churn really does matter, depending on how that relationship exits.

A customer who leaves on good terms with a clean handoff, and No Burn Bridges is a customer who can come back, which we love, or can definitely be a referral for someone who does. All right, so we took an example here of a handoff framework. So when we're thinking about that handoff experience, both from our lens as well as from the customer, as we talked about before, paternity leave and territory changes are among some of those hardest scenarios, just because you're transferring all this institutional knowledge, the relationship context, the trust, not just tasks. We were just passing off a project if they're an onboarding, and not to say that that's not hard, it is hard, but we are really just passing off, here's where we are and here's what comes next.

This is so much more. And we do notice that accounts can take real damage when the incoming rep doesn't know if a competitor evaluation is underway, the economic buyer is brand new, all of these kind of risks and areas of just communication, need to be unlocked for that next person coming in. So step one, the CSM obviously is ongoing, ongoing gonna be monitoring that health. I think it's worth thinking about, obviously CSM is talking to them more day to day, and I did see a question come in about CSM versus account manager, where does that lie?

We'll kind of answer that as we go, but we can definitely answer it towards the end too. But they're also flagging those expansion signals and churn risk as their ongoing cadence goes on. So this is the job, that's not just a handoff task. And then the next step is really looping in that account manager.

So the CSM is gonna engage that account manager when there's a budget cycle, if there's a renewal signal, serious expansion conversation, not everything needs us, and that's fine. We've got a lot of customers and we wanna make sure that we're coming in at the right times and also not bombarding you with sales conversations, like no one likes that. But we're really making sure that the CSM's job is focused on bringing us in at the strategic right times. Third is the actual transition.

So we look at staircase plus the MCP, which we added in just quick side note, MCP didn't exist when we created this presentation originally. So which just goes to show how quickly things have changed over the last couple of months. But MCP is a big part of this now, that's the safety net. So capture what the system knows and what only the outgoing person knows.

The champion backstory, off the record context, any stalled initiative history that tends to happen, all of that provides that additional context. And then we're looking at step four, the warm intro. That's obviously a non-negotiable for strategic accounts. We wanna make sure that they know who it is.

The incoming person shows up with context. The outgoing person provides explicit continuity. The cold intro to a renewal rep, to a new rep is going to be a retention risk in most cases, obviously depending on where the health is. I can think of an example where this happened to me, where I was actually, someone left, someone went on leave, happened sooner than we thought it was going to happen.

I was introduced to a strategic account. They were like, why is sales just showing up here? We need to do these things really tactfully. At that time, it was more of just, we just had to kinda do what made sense, but we wanna make sure that we're being really careful of how that works.

And then for the renewal. Obviously the account manager owns the commercial terms, but the CSM is supporting with that value story. So we really work hand in hand to make sure, as we're going into that renewal cycle, as we're starting to have those conversations with both the business as well as the leadership team and stakeholders, that we are very, very clear on what our roles are. We work with lots of different CSMs.

We're all very, very aware and clear as to who does what. And that before we go into a room talking about a renewal, we are all on the same page. And also, the handoff analysis, or analyst wasn't a thing before we created this presentation too. They literally created it because we had this presentation.

Just, I'm kidding, but. We're like, was our idea that good? So we haven't even used that ourself, but I'm sure that would level this up. Yeah.

Cool, so we do have a little Slido poll. I can't, good, okay. Perfect. All right, so first we wanna get a sense on what AI tools is everyone using.

So just to get a little bit of a feel of the room. All right, so we got Gemini, Copilot, okay. Okay, a lot of Copilot users. Copilot and Claude, cool.

Isn't that crazy? Okay, I'm kind of shocked. I feel like chat GPT was like hottest thing on the block and now not that many people are using it. Okay.

And show of hands, actually, in addition to this, how many of you all have any of these deployed to ICs in addition to leadership? Yeah. Okay, so about half the room, so that's good. We have, I've had actually a lot of conversations across these last couple days where they don't have it yet in the hands of ICs.

Obviously, we know that there's lots of costs and tokens and usage that goes into this, but I think that's the next unlock, but yeah, great to know. Yeah, and then prior to Tuesday, yesterday, today's what's today? No, I don't know. Today's Thursday.

Okay, prior to this week, was anyone not familiar with an MCP? That's okay, raise a hand, anyone? Cool. Right, me neither before, like a couple weeks ago.

We're just bringing up new terms left and right, it's fine. Cool, I think that is it for this slide now. Awesome. All right, so MCP, we're all talking about it, we're all thinking about it, we're all trying to figure out what's the best way to use this, and I think the world that at least I am living in has rapidly changed.

I've found myself way more, obviously more productive. I'm able to, a lot quicker understand what's going on. And so, at least in the account manager role, we use it a lot to prep for a call, prep for a pulse. That's a big part of what we're doing, did the last couple weeks, is getting ready to meet all of you and come in with the right context.

And I think one of the things that we hear a lot, and this is not just a gainsite, we hear it with other companies too, is like, "Headless is the new exciting phrase." Everyone's thinking about, well, how can I gather all the data and everything that is in the true power of something like gainsite, but use it where I'm actually living, use it where these ICs are functioning day to day. And so, for those who do have Cloud, GPT, et cetera, deployed to ICs, that's likely to be the preference, right? And then that's kind of the direction we're going. And I think everyone's at a different level.

Like, I am really using it more for prep and for helping me write some emails, helping give me some ideas, but the more we connect, the more that we obviously can do with it. And so, for example, there are lots of times where I'm saying to myself, well, I need to reach out to someone in this account. Maybe I've never talked to them before, or I want to really kind of establish some sort of relationship. I'm leveraging Cloud to basically help me take a look at all my emails, anything from Slack, anything from Staircase, so looking at every single interaction we've ever had with that customer across our entire work.

And then, of course, looking at CS, so what's in their success plans, what's in Timeline, anything like that, and really just help me create the right way to reach out to this customer, because that's sometimes really, really hard, right? We kind of go back and forth. I know I have perfection paralysis. I am like, what is the right thing to say to this customer that will make them respond to me, and will make them say, well, I don't want to be sold to.

I never want to come off that way. That's my biggest thing. And so, I think that's one of the things that I've found so much use in leveraging the MCP, leveraging everything from Staircase, because Staircase is not just looking at is this customer healthy or not, based on how we're talking to them. It's also picking up on tone.

It's picking up on how does this stakeholder respond to XYZ versus the next. And that really helps me get a little bit more creative in how I speak to these different stakeholders. I have some customers that I've worked with for a really long time. I could even just text them.

I'm gonna talk to that customer a lot differently than I am gonna talk to the customer that maybe I've only talked to once or twice. We've just been on a QBR. We haven't really had that much one-on-one time. So, that's where I'm really finding a lot of use.

The next piece is really gonna be overall account planning and just trying to get in this transition work that we're doing, trying to figure out what has gone on and how can I get a really clear view, both for myself, but if I ask one of my executives to reach out to any of you, I want them to have the right information in the right format and understanding very, very quickly and easily what matters because they don't have a lot of time. So, I have to make sure I'm getting it right to them. And I'm just scratching the surface, right? I think the next stage, and we're gonna see CSMs doing this probably more than we are just because we are not as active in timeline entries and things like that, but we're gonna see more and more CSMs creating success plans from Clod, being able to check and manage CTAs from Clod.

We're gonna be able to see, or whichever platform you're using. And all of this is by the MCP, just being able to write back and actually take actions based on all the things that we're seeing. All right, so, and I think there was also a question around this about how do we align customer success and account management around renewals and expansion. So, when we walk into a renewal, we wanna obviously walk in with open eyes and we wanna be ready to grow if that's what the business warrants.

I think a lot of teams rely heavily on CSQLs. It's not the only way to know what opportunities lie within accounts. We have to look at other ways. We start to kind of get, if we're just looking at these tiny little signals, we wanna make sure the CSQLs that we're raising, they're really meaningful, and that we're not just kind of talking about something they've just scratched the surface on.

We really wanna go deeper. And in many cases, we all are being asked to do more with less, so a lot of people have really large books of business. And that means that a lot's gonna fall through the cracks in terms of signals. Staircase is really what helps us uncover a lot.

So every single signal across any interaction that they're having, whether it be with support or with any of the executives, we wanna make sure that we're uncovering all of that and we don't have the physical bandwidth to go through every single thing. So we're really focused on that in staircase. So especially in a large book, if you are waiting for CSQLs, you're already behind. So we are always looking out for what is, and of course this comes with job changes and things that are going on in the actual account, but we wanna really make sure that we are looking at more than just waiting for a CSQL to pop up.

And the account managers who do show up with context and then not just what's your ARR and what's the renewal date, they have fundamentally different conversations. So more of an account story, who's growing, what's working, where friction is, who's engaged, we walk into renewals with all that information powered by all the things that we're seeing in staircase. And staircase is gonna surface all those signals in real time, so we're seeing usage increases. A stakeholder's asking about a new product, positive sentiment spike from a team you haven't met.

All of those are gonna flow to the account manager as they happen, not six weeks later when someone logs a call note and has the time to get around to it. And we never really wanna leave value on the table when a customer's thriving. I think sometimes we are like, yes, we got happy customers and we're just gonna do an easy renewal and that'll be that, but we wanna also continue thinking about what else can we do, what else can, losing you a little bit, what else can unlock value for this customer to make sure that we're reaching more people in the org, making ourselves sticky. And truthfully, by the time they come up, customers in that conversation, they've probably already decided whether they're growing or contracting, but we wanna make sure that we are going in fully ready to know what to expect.

And the goal of that alignment is really, the people with the deepest account knowledge, they contribute to the commercial strategy. People running commercial strategy understand what's actually happening on the ground. All right, next slide. All right, so relationship intelligence.

And you see here, this is just one example of a prompt. One of the things that we did, and this is, we were like, my mind was blown when we did this, we created a page on our website where we created a bunch of prompts that you can leverage with the MCP to get started. I think there's so much kind of variability across teams as to how they're using this information, how they're prompting it. And we really wanna make sure that there's at least some level of like, here's where to start, obviously iterated on it from there.

So this is just one example, the account handoffs, and this is a prompt that we're using in Cloud that works really, really well for us. And then to go a little bit further with that, hey, can you look at the internet? Look at the news, tell me what else is going on with this company? So I walk in again with more and more context.

So we wanna make sure that we are looking at every single piece of history during a transition. The incoming rep can see what it looked like six months ago, what was the tone of that executive conversation, which contacts have gone quiet, and then the MCP connector really is gonna take it that step further. So it's looking at both staircase and CS, as well as anything else, you can feed it right within, simultaneously from Cloud. So a real transition example, you have a brand new CSM, there's a renewal 90 days, we use that staircase summary and the gain site timeline to build a full handoff doc in there, so walking through the first customer call, knowing key stakeholders and recent interactions.

Here you go, next slide. That's it, that's it. There we go, all right. This is your account management team, if you are a customer of gain site.

So this was who was in and out for six or seven of them. So, you know, just gotta keep it all to them. Yep. And then with that, thank you, and we'll take a look at your questions.

(audience applauding) I can take the first one. So, first question was, can you explain the differences between the CSM versus the account manager role in the gain site org? Great question. So the way that we look at it at gain site is, the CSM is gonna handle day to day, obviously the relationship with the people who are boots on the ground, who are, in our case, admins, people in the business, rev ops, who are really managing gain site.

And then the account manager, we are focused on building those relationships with the higher level stakeholders, so talking to VPs, C-suite, making sure we're also, like our goal is to make sure that we're also establishing the right alignment, multi-threading as we talked about in that heat map, keeping an eye on that to make sure that's always keep continually getting healthy, and then managing the actual renewal commercials as well as expansion. So, think of us as, in our case, since we have a bunch of products that all, to an extent, sometimes live within different teams, we are kind of doing a hybrid of account management and new business. So, if I have a customer who's using CS and they want community, I kind of treat that like a new business deal in my mind, but we're still always linking it back to the other teams that work with us and driving value across the products. And then, taking a look at the top one, when a CSM and account manager are both working the same account, how do you actually decide who owns the relationship with which stakeholder?

I would say we both work very closely together, just kind of understanding, hey, especially if we're new to the conversation or the account, kind of understanding what your relationship is with that certain stakeholder or person or admin or whatever it might be. I would say primarily that relationship is held with the CSM, but then when you're pulling back in the account manager, it's when we're talking about, again, looking at that expansion, the cross-sell or the renewal conversation, and we typically do start with that warmer relationship with the admin to be like, hey, what's brokering that relationship? That's like the key piece of having this type of role, understanding what the conversation looks like and then how can we blossom from there? So I would say that, yeah, the CSM typically does own it, but we kind of work very hand-in-hand together.

All right, Gong, I love this question. This one comes up all the time. Yeah, so Gong has conversational intelligence, that is true. I think one blanket statement, there's always going to be overlap, no matter what, across all these tools.

It's going to happen. So there is a little bit of overlap, however, we go a little bit of a step further, and I think the number one thing, we also use Gong. So keep that in mind. We're using Gong, we're using Staircase, we're using it all, and we are actively using them all.

It's not like one's shelfware and one's not. And I think Gong looks at conversations from a pre-sales lens, generally, and so that's where it's really, really powerful. Our CCO, Brent, actually just said in a meeting today, he uses it well for coaching. It does that really, really well.

But Staircase is looking across more than just calls. Now, yes, Gong does bring in emails, so you can see them, but it's not necessarily analyzing those emails. Staircase is bringing in all this information, analyzing the emails, analyzing the tone, analyzing the calls, analyzing support tickets, and then, of course, looking at what else we can bring in there for conversational intelligence, but it's looking at more of the customer journey than just, here are the calls that we're having with this customer. So I think that's really the biggest difference.

There's definitely, obviously, I think both summaries are important, but to me, at least the way that I use it, I think Gong is really, really helpful in more of this truly new business. So in that previous example I said, customer has CS and they're looking at community. I'm probably gonna use the Gong call summaries to really understand my next steps, really understand the sales process, as opposed to if I'm talking to an existing customer about a renewal, I'm gonna rely on Staircase. Cool.

How do you prevent AM and CS collisions if they're using the same data? I... I don't know how you wanna answer that. I don't know how to answer that.

Is the person who asked that in the room? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think a lot of that obviously comes with the relationship that we have internally, right?

We wanna make sure that we are, when we come onto an account, we are establishing that and trying to work through like what are, whether it's a renewal cycle or just day to day, like what are our roles? In our world, we don't see it happen too often. It does happen sometimes, but I think it's not happening that often because of the amount of time that the CSM gets with the customer versus the amount of time that we do. Typically for us, like if we are wanting to reach out to a customer about something, we're generally going to check in with that CSM about, hey, what's going on?

Maybe I'll check Staircase, I'll check on like, what are the different things that have happened in the last two weeks so that I'm not colliding on the same initiative or on the same thing? I'll just say, if it is the same thing, I'm trying to get to the same goal. Hey, just CC me in your reply and let's work on this together. So I think that visibility helps prevent it.

It's not always gonna be preventable, but I think that's at least what helps me. Would you say the same thing? Yeah, and also just understanding, establishing. I would say when I'm working with my CSMs, establishing who's owning that part of the conversation, I think there's very clear roles on, hey, we're understanding how they're using it, how can I use what those conversations that they're having with the customer to strengthen my conversations that I'm having with them around their renewal, around the expansion, around whatever it might be.

It's really a partnership and how we think about that from that lens. We are at a time. Yeah, so. If you have any other questions, please come up and ask other than that.

Thanks for checking around for the jokes. (laughing) Have a great rest of your day. And safe travels. Safe travels to everyone.

(laughing)