Rapid CS Transformation at Scale: A Gainsight & IBM Success Story

5%, 5% research has shown that increasing customer retention by just 5% has the potential to increase profits by up to 95%. I'm sure most of you in this room are very interested in that statistic. I'm also sure most of you in this room know that customers are more likely to renew if they find value in what they've purchased. And a good way to drive value is to get your clients to use what they've purchased, i.e.

So it's consumption, drives value, drives purchasing, drives that revenue. I'm Laura Gilligan, as she mentioned. I am the worldwide business lead for post-sales tooling. My responsibilities are to take business requirements and initiatives, translate them into technical specifications, work with Kate to ensure that those are implemented appropriately, then enable and educate our sales force on those initiatives we'd like them to drive as well as the tooling we've made available for them.

Kate, would you like to say any more about yourself? Absolutely. So, as was already mentioned, I'm Kate Harbison, and I am the post-sales tools leader within the sales technology space. And I like to work with my team to take that business strategy, turn it into that execution, and really provide the best experience for our users.

And GainSight is a really big part of the tooling stack that we use in customer success. Great. Thank you. So Kate and I work really closely together.

We have a lot of fun. We're going to spend the next 15 to 20 minutes talking about the project that we recently launched, and then we'll go into the how we did it, what we did, why we did it, and then we'll bring our GainSight partners on the stage for a Q&A slash panel discussion. So I've been with customer success at IBM for the last six years, and we tried many projects and initiatives to try to solve how do we increase better customer retention and value. But despite all our efforts, nothing was giving us the results that we wanted.

So we challenged ourselves with this problem statement. How do we increase product consumption and drive greater client value? What's not written is how do we do it in a sticky manner, a scalable manner, and an effective manner that all of IBM believes in it and adopts it. So before we dived in and just solved another problem, we took a step back to figure out, well, why are we in the position that we're in?

And we came up with this brick wall, because this is really how we feel like we've been operating. We fall between sales and CS. Sellers are on one side. They're selling.

That's how they're incentive. They sell the product. They move on. A lot of times, they don't know what else the customer has, which makes a difference when you're trying to upsell or cross-sell, because without knowing what else is in the client's portfolio, it's kind of hard to sell them more value.

And then when it came time for the renewal, there's risks to that renewal, but they weren't exposed to the sellers. So the sellers came in blind. They had problems with those renewals. On the other side of the brick wall is our CS team, and I envisioned them trying to peek over the brick wall and get insights over the wall either way.

That was very hard. That wall is really tall. A lot of times, they didn't know what the customer had bought until it just showed up as a product in their gain site. They didn't know why the customer bought it or how.

Was it part of a catalog, or did they buy it outright? What was the use case? Why did the customer buy that product? As they're trying to figure all that out with the customer, it's yet one more IBM or that that customer has to get to know and work with, so that's jarring for the customer.

And then the CS really does have some good insights, but trying to get them to share that back with the sales team was really hard. So we decided to go big and bold and embed customer success into the DNA of our entire technical sales community. When I see it written on the screen like this, it seems very straightforward and it makes a lot of sense, because now if you have the same seller responsible to sell the product and work with the customer to adopt the product, you have that end-to-end workflow that hopefully will generate customer value. But when you think about the sheer size of IBM and the thousands of technical sellers that we have, 90% of which were not familiar with the post-sales work and what was involved in getting clients to adopt, that was not an easy task.

So let's dive into the details and see what we did. So what was our vision? We knew our first priority had to be to increase the data availability within our systems. This not only means who has access to the system, who can see the data, but what data are we putting into the system to make sure that the view is as comprehensive as possible for all of our clients and all of our products within IBM.

And then as Laura mentioned, we had to reduce that barrier. We had to remove that and create this workflow that created and facilitated collaboration between both sales and CS so that we could really improve the productivity between the whole system and drive that client journey from the beginning. But to do that, we knew we had to integrate GainSight into our Salesforce instance to create a unified tooling experience that naturally drove that collaboration between the two communities. And really that sounds great, but how do we do that?

We understood the transformation had to be at the core of this project that we were implementing. We knew that we had to change the way that we were thinking about customer success. It couldn't just start post-sales. It had to start at the beginning of the client journey and continue all the way through the renewals, through the entire journey within IBM.

But to do that, we knew we had to transform our tooling. The way that we were currently using GainSight within our tooling stack did not support the strategy that we were trying to achieve. So we knew we had to make some very radical transformations with it. This is really important.

Salesforce and comfort do not coexist. And we learned very quickly that to really get where we were going, we had to completely start fresh with our GainSight instance. We had to get very comfortable with being uncomfortable. And as we heard today, right, on the other side of being uncomfortable is a lot of positive outcome and a lot of excitement, right?

Okay. I understand starting fresh. We're IBM. It's a lot, right?

Why couldn't we just use what we were already using, right? Well, we've been using GainSight within IBM for almost a decade. That's a decade of evolving business needs. It's a decade of configuration changes, a decade of rules and processes and clutter.

And we understood pretty quickly that we could not declutter the system in the time that we had. And so we needed to kind of take that step, right? Also, we've had a lot of really talented admins within our system who have created some amazing processes. And a lot of those processes are very customized to our needs.

But we found them to be single use sometimes. We found that as we got new requirements, as we learned that, you know, okay, we've got a new business use case, we need to enable this. Well, great. Our existing jobs don't support that.

They're single focused. We don't have reusable automation. And really to take that step in creating that reusable automation, we had to kind of start over. And we had a lot of manual maintenance in our system.

With the overhead that came with the single use case customization, it wasn't scalable. And we were about to roll this out to 10x plus users than we've ever seen in the system before. And so we knew we had to build something that was scalable, that was maintainable. And we also knew that the integration that we were creating with Salesforce really led to a lot of new governance models and data model changes that we had not had to have in the system.

And that our current system just didn't support. Okay. So what did we end up doing? As Kate said, we did decide to fully rebuild our Gainsight instance.

That was scary. We weren't starting completely from scratch because we did have business logic and rules that we could reuse. But we deliberately built it fresh and very thoughtfully. We embedded it directly into Salesforce.

We used the Gainsight managed package and native connectors. So now we had that one integrated tool that everybody uses, Salesforce. Because we're introducing this post sales motion across the sales community, we had to introduce a new post sales operating model. And then where IBM, we're complex.

We have hugely complex data sets. So whatever we implemented had to handle all of our data complexities. And oh, by the way, here's the kicker. We had three months in which to build this thing.

We met in August. The first time we had our tech kickoff in late September and we delivered January 12th. So that was a huge accomplishment. How did we do that?

To start with, we had a very clear shared vision of success. Our VP Kim, who you heard at the keynote today, started out with this is what success looks like. She was very clear in explaining it and we all understood it and absorbed it. So we are all operating under the same vision.

Powerful data management. We know how to deal with complex data. We are IBM. We do this all the time for our customers.

So we did it for ourselves. So our solution handles some very complex structures and it does it very smoothly. Our mantra was out of the box and Gainsight best practices. So we did use Gainsight native connectors.

We did use out of the box functionality as much as possible. If we couldn't, we had some hard conversations with our Gainsight team as to why. We did do some customization but it was very strategic, very thoughtful and we did it in a very scalable, supportable way. I can't say enough how we were thankful for the invaluable support of our Gainsight team and the knowledge of the admins and the project managers and developers.

That was critical in meeting our three-month deadline. And then underpinning everything was the business leadership and executive support. This was not just a CS problem. This was an IBM-wide solution.

So we had to operate across all different parts of IBM and having a consistent message and a consistent adoption at the executive levels was key. We also pulled the right team together from both Gainsight and IBM. Everybody was effective and those were all very success factors. So just to summarize, we went from multiple tool interactions to one integrated tooling experience in Salesforce that's available to all of IBM.

We think back to that brick wall. We've knocked that brick wall down. We went from silos and data and teams to consistent end-to-end workflows so we have one consistent flow for our customers. System maintenance.

We don't have to have a big team focused on just keeping the system running. We now have a much smaller streamline team and we can focus on delivering those net new outcomes both for our business and our customers that make a difference. And then I'll be honest, we were on a very old flat tool stack and we really didn't have a lot of capability for insights. Now that we've done this, we've done the hard work to position ourselves for AI and improved insights and we can't wait to get started on that trajectory.

And overall, it has been a success. After the bulk of the people got over the "Oh my gosh, what did you do to me" phase, then the accolades have started rolling in and these are some real life unsolicited feedback that we have gotten. So we have a long way to go in our ultimate vision, but our initial launch was very successful. That being said, like any massive project, that's not to say there weren't bumps in the road.

So let's talk about some of those, right? We all know that with every project, we have to remain flexible. Otherwise what happens when something doesn't go right, right? Well one of the first things that we had to do was Kim had an amazing vision, but not everyone understood it.

We had to work with everyone around us to really obtain that buy-in and it wasn't always easy, but I think at the end we ended up getting there and we learned a lot along the way. Because our build window was so short, we had to make assumptions. We had to just push forward and know that if those assumptions didn't pan out, that's okay. We are flexible.

We can pivot and go the direction that we need to go now that we know that that assumption was not correct. And if anyone here knows how to stop scope creep, please let me know because I'm still trying to figure out how to stop that. It's just inevitable, I think in any project, but because of our really short development window, we knew to help stop that scope creep, we needed ruthless prioritization on what we were delivering on day one. And Kim has said it to all of our sellers, all of our CSMs, guys, we are building the house where we're living in it.

It's not going to be perfect from the start, but that's okay. How do we provide the best experience we can from the beginning and accept some of that technical debt that we know that we're going to immediately prioritize while we are introducing this new model to the thousands of users who are now going to use it and listening to the feedback that they're telling us. But one of the hardest parts of that is actually just getting the word out. This was a new process for a lot of people with new tooling.

Some people didn't even know existed in the company yet. Getting that word out to the users was an issue, and we're still trying to get over that sometimes, but we're building that community. We're learning how to make that process better so that as we roll out new changes in the future, we are getting those words out. We are making sure that everyone knows about it.

We really had to develop some thick skin. There was a lot of really positive feedback, but there was also a lot of negative feedback that we had to, unfortunately, Laura had to take a lot of the brunt on because she was working with the sellers every single day. But it's okay. We developed that thick skin, and now we're listening to the feedback, and we're understanding okay, how are our users engaging with the system?

What can we do to improve moving forward? We're not done. We're nowhere close to done, and we're already looking ahead. One of the things, as we've mentioned, we're trying to make something sticky.

We're trying to make something that our users come back to over and over and over again. They want to use, they want to engage with the system, they want to work it into their daily routines. We got to understand how we sustain the outcomes that we provided to our users in January. We're working on that governance model.

We're making sure that we are supporting our users in the way that they need to be to go in and use the systems the way that they need to. We've also set that groundwork for AI, and we are super excited to move forward and look at all of the options. You're hearing a lot about them today, right? That we can even leverage within our system to bring those insights to our user base.

And as I've mentioned before, we really want to continue focusing on that user base. Listening, refining, evolving, understanding. How can we bring the best experience to these users, continue to address the needs of the business as they see value? And the best part of it is, now that we're integrated into Salesforce, we have a whole new mindset of what's possible.

We have an integrated experience that we've never had before that we can design differently and design better for. And we're just at the beginning, right? We've got so far to go, and we're so excited about where we're going, but we feel like we've really brought something to the business that will provide a lot of value. Now we couldn't have done any of this without Gainsight.

And so we want to bring our partners from Gainsight up. We're going to dive a little bit deeper into the partnership that we built during this project and answer some of your questions. Want to introduce yourself? I just took the shortcut there.

Yeah. Thank you. Like I said, it's been an absolute fantastic partnership working with you guys. We know there's a lot of bumps that go along with a project like this, and to do what was accomplished within a three-month window is a feat that we're all very proud of.

So we did want to just talk a little bit about the process and answer some questions as we go. I'll let you all come pop through, and I'll help moderate throughout this. But quick introduction, Jeff Boyer within our services team, Chris Brogdon. Yep.

My report to Jeff. Within our services team. And then behind us was a whole slew of teammates that worked throughout this process and really partnered with IBM along the way. Our product team was very engaged, our engineering team, our technical teams.

So it was really not just a collaborative effort with IBM, but it was a collaborative effort internally for us at Gainsight and really be able to multiply how we operate as a team. So it's been great throughout that. The first question that I'll start with here is, it says now that the rebuild is done, what are you doing to make sure you don't end up back in the same situation? And I'm going to take this as a two part question.

I'm going to go first part is coming into this, we knew that there was a lot of tech debt. How did we make sure that we set the system up today that we didn't start with inheriting a tech debt into that system and making sure that we were ruthless in that prioritization? So let's start with that one if there's someone. Sure.

I can go first. So from a Gainsight perspective, right? We not work, I won't call us the no men, but that was kind of our job, right? Was, are the things that you're asking for aligned to your vision of we need to be live in three months and have the right data layer in place for all the future things that you want to do?

So it was less no, but how about later? Right? It was kind of the biggest thing we had to have constant conversations on whenever those additional asks came up. Yeah, I think I think too with that, though, it was also taking a step back on our side in making sure that the decisions we were making were strategic for the whole, not the individual, right?

Because I think that's where we got ourselves in a lot of trouble was, okay, this one person wants this one report to do their job. Okay, cool. But that doesn't work for anyone else. And the process that we built for that only works for that one thing, right?

So it's taking a more cohesive look at, well, what actually supports the business, right? And drives the users to see the insights that they need to see, but not just for that one person. Cool. And then going forward, what's the go forward plan so it doesn't happen again?

I know you hit on a little bit with, you know, just over customization and some of the operational process you guys have in place, but how do you ensure it doesn't happen? Yeah, I think it goes back to that ruthless prioritization and making sure that if somebody asks for something, we look at it from a holistic perspective, does it work for 80% of the users as opposed to just one team? And then also when my team is actually doing the designing, the admins are in there working on the system, it's okay, I love where you're going. This is a great rule, but is it reusable?

What can we do to make it more of an automation framework versus a individualized process, right? Cool. All right, well, I see there's some hot topics on here. So embedding customer success into the DNA of your technical sales community is a big work between sales and CS.

How does, sorry, it chipped on me. How did you bring sales along for this and what resistance did you run into throughout this process? So this was a big effort and rebuilding tooling and installing tooling and making all that work was huge, but this involved changing the way IBM works. We solved a big part of the problem by making a sales role that has both pre and post sales responsibility.

So we spoke to sellers in terms of money. They are incented on pre-sales, they are incented on post sales. We also have a digital team that is just CSMs, so that we've used our integrated tooling experience to share with the pre-sales and the post sales team. Since everybody has access to Gainsight, they can see everything about that customer software portfolio and how it's useful in all aspects.

I did a lot of enablement on this is now what you can do. This is how you can use it. This is now what you see. And just showing people that they now have access to ELA data, usage data, health score data, renewal data, software product entitlement data was eye-opening for a lot of them.

So once I got the message out, it started to just speak for itself because they could see everything that they had. There was a lot of resistance. There's still a lot of resistance, but my skin is very thick and we're still working through it. How much did timing play into it?

Because I know there was a very tight window to deliver this. And how did the timing of it had to be, we had to have something in place play into the enablement and the collaboration with sales. Right. So January is when IBM kicks off the new year.

New roles, new missions, new incentive plans. We had to have this in place for that so that we could support the new structure for 2026. And that allows you to hit training and enablement. And while all the change is happening, this is a new component that you're able to bring everybody together for.

Exactly. But I don't think we really could have done it without the executives behind us. Right. And the managers and the leaders really helping drive that vision.

It really wouldn't have been possible. This one kind of flows along the same way, but it's like how involved were sales in breaking down the wall in that collaboration? So we actually pulled together some very strategic groups of sellers who became our advocates and helped us design the system. So by bringing those people on board, they can then grassroots it out to the rest of their teams.

So and then we knew what we were building really was going to help solve those problems. And yes, some sellers love it. Some sellers are still fighting the battle. But now that they're realizing the benefit and how they get paid depends on how well they use the system.

It's getting better. Cool. Moving forward, shifting a little bit into the operations of your CSMs. But at what point do the CSMs start their engagement with the customers?

Now that we have pre-sales and we've got information, we've got sales that can work together with post-sales. Like, does that bring your teams closer? How does that operate today? Definitely closer.

So we've broadened the concept of the account team. So the account team is everybody from our technical leads to our managing directors, to our CS, to our CSEs, who's the combined role. And since everybody's working out of Salesforce, we have the same account team assignments in Salesforce and in Gainsight. So everybody has visibility.

Depending on your specific role, like I said, some people have pre and post-sales responsibilities. So they would get involved in the pre-sale. Digital CSMs get involved at the post-sale once that shows up, but they are aware of what's going on. We're also working actively to integrate post-sales into our account planning process.

So that also helps bringing post-sales customer awareness into the very beginning of the journey. Nice. All right. Another one, as we get into, kind of stepping into the weeds a little bit here, but can you expand on the technical debt that you encountered and what you did to overcome it?

Yeah. So I hinted at it a little bit, but right around the same time that we were trying to build out this new model, there were some pretty significant data model changes within our just IBM in general. And we wanted to be kind of one of the first ones implementing and using the new models, but we kind of also had to wait for some of the other business to catch up too. So we ended up knowing that, okay, we can only step so far into these new models and redefine what our client and our relationship structure actually looks like.

And we're kind of operating in a little bit of a dual model right now. So we know there's a little cleanup that we're doing, even this week and last week and in the coming weeks, to continue to align with where IBM has just been going in general internally. And so that was some of the technical debt. Some of the other technical debt was more around, well, okay, what can we actually deliver to the users right now within Salesforce?

So we know we wanted GainSight to be available in certain portions of Salesforce, but we knew that, okay, out of the four places we wanted it, we only have time for two, right? So we know that we've got these really big fast follows that we're going to continue to work to get it in the other places that we need and really focus on, okay, what do they need to get off the ground right now while we are now implementing additional areas of focus within Salesforce and continuing to drive those insights. Chris, and then I'll flip it to you a little bit because from the, you were in the weeds as the new instance and what do we bring over? What do we keep?

How did we approach that? What was the strategy there? So I mean, it was obviously partnering up with our IBM partners to figure out what was most important, but also working with our product teams, right? And internal folks that we brought in to make sure that we're doing the right things in the right order to make sure that we hit the deadline since that was kind of number one, right?

We got to make this January 12th, we can't have everything. So making sure that we have all the internal partners at GainSight that can come in and do the advisory and do the technical discovery to make sure that we're set up for success. Cool. Okay, so I'm going to switch around here a little bit, but as far as enablement strategy given the tight timeframe, I know we talked a little bit about timing was key.

We had the organizational changes occurring, but as far as enablement, how did you go about, what sort of sessions did you run to really bring the teams together and make sure they knew what was available to them? Yeah, so like I said, we had our pilot users, so we educated them. They had first insights into what we were doing so they could start spreading the word. You know, the executive levels had their kickoffs and then the word just kind of spread, got disseminated via the management chain.

I hosted the first couple of weeks, it was I think three or four times a week, enablement sessions, open office hours so anybody could come. And those calls were packed for quite a while. I was going to end them in March, I actually extended them through April once a week. So it was just really open-ended discussions all the time.

We had Slack channels available. We really put a full court press on making ourselves available to answer questions. Anything else you want to add there? Not really.

I mean, truly it was just about listening to the users as they came to us, making sure that we had as much enablement ready from the beginning, but then as they had those questions, you know, what, okay, how do you use a system, or okay, we understand you have this question, we probably should create additional documentation. So adding to the documentation as we went, so as users come in, FAQs, tips and tricks, you know, all that stuff. So continuing to build on that documentation as we got the feedback from the users. I would also say, you know, from an outside perspective, you guys were consistently showing what was coming to your users.

And so it's like, it never felt like they were in the dark. I know there were situations like, all right, we need to show something by this date. And so it's like, we constantly were able to iterate and like, this is coming. Here's what's coming next.

And here's how it's going to work. And so I think a lot of that, and then you incorporate that into the larger training and enablement, you were able to run like, I think that helped build momentum as we got through this. I know it's quick, but you think of like, oh, momentum, but it's like, you know, once it gets going, it was good to bring the users along. I saw one that I'll just ask it.

It talked about Salesforce being the front end. And so maybe that's a quick answer we can pop into. And I'll maybe I'll say one thing. This is one area that, you know, we talked about the LWC, the Lightning Web Components.

That was something from a gain site perspective that we thought would bring value, not just to IBM, but to the entire customer base, the entire industry. And so we start when we as gain site, look at features and functionality like this, and does this make sense? Like that was the key driver for us is, is this something that the market is going to enjoy and use and get benefit from? And so I'll flip it back.

I know LWC was kind of a big, big component of all of this, but I'll let you take it. Yeah, well, I also want to I want to answer that as well, real quick, because I want to say yes and no. So the biggest enablement that we could give to our users was to get it into Salesforce, but not all of IBM is in Salesforce. So we kind of had to operate in this dual model where, yes, our sellers are CSMs, they're in Salesforce every day, that's their unified tooling space, but other parts of IBM are not.

So giving them access to the standalone instance as well to create an in a collaborative environment between the two systems so that if you're not in Salesforce, it's okay, you can still see Gainsight. Here's how you access it. Just meeting the users where they are, right? Whether it's directing Gainsight or Salesforce was the goal.

Yeah. Cool. All right. This is the one that has the most upvotes, so I got to make sure I get to it is what KPIs are you using to measure the success of the redesign?

Well, I can say from IBM and then you can talk about your. We've been looking at the users, has the user count increased? And yes, it has increased quite a bit. And then we have our success metrics that people are paid on.

So the incentives that we're looking at and those, we look at deployment, we look at renewals, we look at risk, all those things. And as those goals are being met, we know that people are using the system. And I don't know if you look at anything specifically. I mean, from a Gainsight perspective, we're consistently tracking and monitoring the adoption.

So how is IBM? Are you guys using it? Are users coming into the system? And then not only are they coming in, but are they staying?

So are they coming in once and then we're seeing a drop off or are they coming in and they're consistently staying there? And that's what we're looking for. So for us, we're going to continue, you know, hey, we've got this base of users in the system. How do we help IBM in the long term continue to drive that?

Whether that's consistently driving that upwards or consistent usage of the platform. So for us, that's what we're looking at. Obviously, from a services perspective, we have different metrics and numbers and all of that stuff on the specifics. But from a Gainsight perspective, it's really the adoption of the tool and are they using the right things?

And that adoption has been really important for us because it really helps us understand how much we are getting the word out, right? Because it's one of our hardest things. And so, you know, we'll have events, we'll have enablement and then we get to kind of watch the numbers. Okay.

Are we getting did we drive more users with this? No. Okay. Maybe we should think about doing this differently next time, that kind of thing.

Cool. I will guess the next one here is how many products teams are affected by this change? And maybe what I'll say is like, which product and teams are in the system today? And what do we still have on the roadmap, maybe?

So we have all of IBM software products in Gainsight. I don't even know how many that is, but that's a lot. And the teams are anybody dealing with sales. So our tech sales community, our account technical leaders, our digital CSMs, our sellers, our product teams, our business partners, like the whole gamut is impacted by this change.

So it's very widespread. Can you add the second one down? I want to speak to that one. The CTA one.

Yeah. Okay. Next question is, are teams managing all tasks and CTAs and logging all client interactions via Gainsight integration within Salesforce or some still using Gainsight as their primary tool? Right.

So depending on who you are, like Kate said, some people go in through Salesforce, some people go in standalone. Our mantra is if it's a pre-sales activity, you're using kind of the Salesforce side of the house. In the post sales activity, you're using the Gainsight side of the house. So we do use the Lightning Web Components to integrate Gainsight.

It's kind of like an iframe. You can go into Salesforce and you see Gainsight. We have the IAC or the Salesforce activity feed and the Gainsight timeline, and we integrate those. So they are synced back and forth.

That allows the activity feed and IAC and all of that information to go into Gainsight. And then we use the cheat sheet to pick that up. So that is a really good way to ensure that no matter where you are in this integrated system, you're getting all the information about your customer. CTAs really haven't taken off yet.

We have some plans for CTAs as we build out our digital space, but those are very much still possibility in the system. And then for those people logging into Gainsight to standalone, they're still in the Gainsight system. So they see all the IAC activity because we're feeding that into the timeline. I mean, we had a lot of automated CTAs in our prior instance, but again, they were very single use.

Only this one team was using them, that kind of thing. So we really took a step back and said, what actually makes sense for a broader sort of automated CTA experience and how do we actually use the CTAs to their full capability within the teams? Right. Cool.

We may have hit on this one already. I'm just going down the list here. What does a CSM do during presale? I think you talked about it depends on there's different types of CSMs and it's all about the pod model that are the account team model that you operate within.

So depending on the role, they may have different. Different responsibilities. But the biggest change that we've made with this whole project is that we've really focused on an integrated account team. So always before CS was kind of an afterthought.

Now the CSMs or the CSEs are brought into the account planning. They're part of the team from day one, which has been a very positive change. I'll pop in. I saw this one out there.

But it says how many resource hours, gain site, IBM, trying to understand how big this project was. I think something that we referenced consistently with this project was small but mighty team. I feel like that was, you can think of it and it's like, oh, we've got this big project and we've got hundreds of people on it. There's a certain point where people don't enhance a project.

Doesn't make it go faster. And so one of the things that we really focused is it was a very small but mighty team. I know from the gain site side, we had our project managers. We had Chris from our solution architect team.

We had two or three technical architects that were helping with configuration and build. And then we had other, we talked about product and engineering. We had folks pop in and out. We had data migration folks pop in and out.

But from a core project team from the gain site side, four of us or so. Small but mighty. I'll go for the IBM side here. Yeah, IBM was small but mighty too.

Kate and I and then Kate had a handful of people on her team who again came in and out. Kim and I worked together very closely. And then we did have to touch a lot of different pieces in IBM. But from the core team, it was what, maybe four?

Four of us? Four to five, yeah. So it was really small. And I know from, at least from the technical side, one thing that may make IBM stand out from some others is our data sets are extremely complex within the system.

So there's a lot of manipulation that we actually have to do to the data before it ever goes into gain site to make it make sense from a holistic standpoint. So I've got a whole back end team that works on just taking all the data from the different parts around IBM and translating it into one sort of cohesive, understandable data set that we can feed into gain site in different ways. So that like, it was very important for that team to be involved from the beginning because we had to make a lot of very difficult decisions on, you know, what are, how are we actually going to handle data? How are we going to work with these new data models that we're finding within IBM and translate it in a way that makes sense to gain site?

So we, that was a really important part. And then also just making sure like my admins were involved from the beginning as well. Cool. I know we've got about two and a half minutes here, so we'll go super quick on the last two questions that are out there.

But back to the resistance, you experienced resistance. What strategies did you use? Or are you using now to overcome the resistance? Yeah, so sales plans aside, I think it's just been the really open communication and being very streamlined and okay, this is coming next, this is coming next.

And this is why you should care. Not just that, hey, you have all this stuff, but this is how you can use it to be effective. And this is what you're, what's coming up next. And this is how you will be able to use it.

And we listened to your feedback and this is how we implemented it. So just being really responsive to our users has garnered support and they know that we're listening to them. We still have a couple holdouts that are being a little tricky, but I work with them very often and we have one-on-one sessions so I can really get their input and make them realize that we are listening to them. Yeah, and it's building, helping build that roadmap, right?

And there's still places that we want to go with our roadmap, but we've at least created a space where every week or every other week we're posting, "Hey, by the way, we've heard you. Here's what we've actually delivered to you, right? And here's what we hear from you and we're still working on, right?" It's taking us a little bit longer, but we know that it's an issue and we know that it's going to make your life easier. So we're working on it.

Here's when we expect to potentially roll it out. And then when it comes to having we actually roll it out, it becomes the, "Hey, guess what we released? Guess what you can do now?" Cool. Last minute, do we run the last, do you want to run the last question or should we wrap it up here?

Have you used out-of-the-box Salesforce and Gainsight APIs to integrate for metrics or using Salesforce or Gainsight? You guys want to take that one? So out-of-the-box connection, yes, but most data is actually coming from external tools that then link what's happening in Salesforce and everywhere else. So yes, it's out-of-the-box and the metrics are coming from both places, I guess.

I think one of the things you did is to match it up. If I'm not mistaken, it's the account records that are coming from Salesforce and so it's nearing up. We know this information is coming through the connectors within Salesforce and then how do we match up the other data that fits that account structure? I know we're at time.

I see a couple more questions rolling in. I'll say, Laura, Kate, once again, thank you for this. And for the folks out there, if there's further questions, comments, definitely have a connection with folks and thank you everybody for your attendance today. Yes, thank you.

Thank you, everyone.