Stop Drowning in Data: Turning Customer Signals into NRR

(audience applauding) Hey everyone, I know I am standing between you betting it all on red with a drink in your hand. So I promise that I'm gonna try to pack as much in to this session that is tactical, provides inspiration, and I appreciate the opportunity just to come here and geek out with my people. Just feel so good to be back at a pulse. Just a show of hands, whose first pulse is this?

Wow, oh my gosh, I hope you guys are having, who has met someone new for the first time today? Okay, good, even more hands than were raised before. So I think you by now have seen the power, pulse the power of meeting people that you can stay connected with, connect with them on LinkedIn because that's what it's all about. Okay, so, nope, I'm pressing the laser pointer.

Okay, let's go. Okay, our agenda for today, I'm gonna take you through some of my personal philosophies around customer success. I'm a principal's first kind of girl, I love a framework. So I'm gonna take you through what we use today at Lytho and how this journey around customer signals really started for me.

Then we're gonna get into the practical stuff. It's really nice, I don't know who was here for the very last session. There's been a lot of talk about signals today, customer signals, what did those mean? And I'm hoping I'm gonna give you some really practical examples of how we use signals and ways that you can think about those and bring those back to your own organization.

First, a little bit about Lytho. We are an embedded content governance platform, which is a new positioning of our workflow and dam solutions built to meet the needs of marketing teams in an AI first world. Like so many of the people I've talked to today, we are now incorporating AI into our product set, figuring out the new product and positioning and packaging that comes with that. And so it's a really, really interesting time to be in customer success right now.

We have around 600 customers. Roughly 70% of our customers do have a dedicated CSM. And so that gives you a sense of our scale, the kind of human-led motion that we run. And I think that context matters for today because we do have a very genuinely interesting privilege of being able to experiment on both sides.

We can be digital led and have a lot of digital strategies as well as human first to validate and confirm those strategies. And we're always trying to find that right mix of what works, which is really what this session is about. I also thought it'd be interesting to give you some context at the different positions that I've held throughout the last 15 years in my career in SAS. I like to joke that I've got in my full MPA just being in SAS and looking at NRR from every single angle.

I started my career in marketing on the performance side, pay-per-click, digital, social. And then I joined LIFO back in 2016 as a product manager. And then in 2019, I had an opportunity to create experiences around the products that we had just launched. And I landed in customer success and I was hooked because it's just so endlessly dimensional.

All the different ways that you get to put your hands around customer problems, educate, build the ops around them, build the support. I love every single part of customer success. And while I was leading the customer success team for the last five years, we were able to increase GRR by seven percentage points. Customer value grew on average by 33%.

We were able to double advocacy events year over year over year and scaled quantitative and qualitative ROI. And these are things I've spoke about in previous pulses. But in December, our CEO Scott Wieran came over to me and he said, "I don't want you on customer success anymore." I said, "I'm sorry." Okay, what? He said, "I need you on revenue." And I said, "Scott, customer success is revenue.

"What are you being?" And he's like, "No, no, no. "I need you only focused on customer growth." And so this whole new discipline of customer growth was born. This team was born at LIFO. We sit between sales and customer success.

I report directly to the CEO and we built this team focusing specifically on commercial customer growth. And I was talking to a few people at lunch today and this seems to be a new trend now going on at different companies where this hyper focus is starting to occur. And I'd love to see it because after years and years of companies only seeming to focus on net new sales, it feels like we're finally all collectively recognizing the tremendous impact that existing customers have on a company's growth trajectory. Not just to maintain the base, but the best revenue, that revenue focus can come from generating reoccurring impact, right?

The value of customer success and what that product can offer, and then building from there to create exponential revenue. So I became a salesperson. I transitioned to customer growth and I'm like, "Oh, what? "Like it's hard?

"There's no way this can be harder "than customer success, right?" So I moved over my best, most enterprise, most commercial customer success manager over to my team and we brought in two former LIFO customers who really understood and genuinely believed in the transformation that LIFO can bring to an organization. I was handed a quota, a whole new tech stack and a lot of expectation. So what did I do first? I went back to the last five years in the foundation that I had just spent and time and effort and energy building with my team and came back to the mission that we were already operating within.

That our mission in customer success is to create experiences and deliver outcomes that customers wanna keep having over and over and over. That's the point, right? And that's how I believe you earn the right to grow. And I'll also say that our North Star has always been which I don't know why that's controversial, but for some reason there's always those debates going on LinkedIn like, oh, your North Star shouldn't be in our R, it's GRR.

Truly I believe that the best way to define and confirm that you are delivering value to your customer base is in our R. But the thing that we all know is that whether you believe GRR, NRR, whatever it is, both of those are lagging indicators. So by the time those numbers are moving, a lot has already happened, which means you have to start working backwards and identifying behaviors and signals that drive the NRR before that NRR number tells you anything. So this pyramid represents how I think about that.

At the top we have churn and expansion dollars, which are the outcomes, those lagging indicators. And below that are laser health score, which we run entirely out of gain sight. It deserves a whole separate session. But then beneath that, the SLAs and activities that we expect from every team, from implementation to customer success, to support, to education, to make sure that they are accountable and responsible for the behaviors that are going to drive great customer health, that are then going to drive expansion dollars and retention.

It's a pyramid of leading indicators all pointing to that single lagging one. So I'm lucky in that I'm starting with this incredibly solid foundation of customer success that we've built over the years. But when I started to think about how I was gonna apply this to the world of customer growth, I realized there was an entire layer missing here. That was the reason why all of these cars, calls and strategic business reviews and events were happening.

And that's where all the customer signals come in. They were there and we were acting on a lot of them. But I knew that if I was really gonna transform how we were gonna deliver on growth objectives, I needed to rethink how we were interpreting these signals because we had way over indexed all of our operations around interpreting these for risk and not for growth. So as I started to dig around in my new universe, I realized we had more data that I had access to now in my new role.

Marketing intent data, financial signals, different AI tools. And then, like I'm sure so many of you have faced, we were given this mandate to use even more AI. Be AI first in how we solve our problems, which meant that we had even more data to work with. The data was gonna just be compounding and compounding every single quarter.

And so when you can't tell the difference between a signal that matters and what's just noise, what are you gonna do? You're just gonna default to whoever yelled loudest that week, which is not a strategy, it's just survival. So it struck me that if I was gonna create a strategy to really hone in on growth, I needed clarity around the intent of these signals. And I wanna spend a minute here because I think that intent, this word, means something in the world of customer success than it does everywhere else.

And when I started to really unlock that definition, it changed the way I was thinking about these problems to solve. Most of you, I would believe, have heard this word intent probably in a marketing context. It means that somebody is in buying mode. Maybe they're researching, they're on G2, they're on your pricing page.

An entire company is like Sixcent and Bombara and Demandbase have been built on this premise that if you catch the signal early enough, you can activate a pipeline before your competitor even knows that somebody is researching for that solution. Marketing has figured this out years ago, but in customer success, we've actually been sitting on richer intent signals than marketing or sales has ever had, but we've never formalized them or built the infrastructure around them. So this is the definition that I'm gonna be using and basing everything else that I share today. Intent is a pattern of behavior that predicts when a customer is likely to do next before they tell you.

And what I'll also add here is that the direction of this signal matters as much, if not more, than the signal itself. So before you say, well, great, let's just invest in a bunch of magic eight balls and shake them a bunch of times to figure out what that signal means, we have to remember, and like you've heard probably in every session today, AI has changed everything for us. And I'm not talking about AI writing the renewal emails or summarizing a call or summarizing and, you know, synthesizing your account data, which is pretty much table stakes at this point. What's actually changed is that the first time you can program and create intent signals and direct them to the team that can actually act on them in real time with that point of view, with the context of what action to take that's going to create the most favorable outcome.

AI has given us now the infrastructure to actually do something with all of these signals. So when I realized that, I realized that's why my role had been created. And that's probably why you're sitting here in the session today. And when I realized that, it was time to get building.

So what did I start with? I started with a framework. And this is a signal framework that we are now using today. And this is where we're going to spend the rest of the session.

We have created five signal categories, contact, industry, product, market, and customer success as a signal category. But before I go deeper on each, I want you to notice something about this list. It actually moves from the outside in. Contact and industry signals are largely external.

They're about the world around your customer. Product and market signals are behavioral. They're about what your customer is actively doing day after day. And customer success signals are always going to be human.

This is what your team hears and feels and captures in the room while they're with your customer. Every category is going to require a different kind of listening, a different kind of action that might be based from it, a different way of looking at it. So I'm going to dive deep into how we're using these at LIFO and hopefully it's going to provide some inspiration. Not everything's going to apply to your organization or your particular system, but my hope is is it's going to give you at least one thing to operationalize after today.

And one more thing before we get into this, I do believe deeply in the power of customer ops, revenue operations, integration, system connectivity. So I am happy to get into the technical bits of how we've wired everything up that I'm going to share with you. But know that the vast majority of this can be achieved with just Gainsight, the LLM of your choice, and maybe in 8N or Zapier integrations built between them. Okay, so first let's talk about contact intent signals.

This one is generally very messy in most organizations, but I'd argue it's actually one of the most valuable signals if you can get your hands on it because people are so influential to the account. My recommendation is to start with your product first and try to tap into the contact intel that your product makes available. If not, you can move on to marketing, but at LIFO we do ask for email and title at signup. So when a new user is added to the account or self registers for the account, they're providing us with that data.

The title is optional, but a lot of people do put it in. And then we also have different license types, roles and permission sets. And when we're able to combine those two sources of data, we can make some really interesting inferences. And I love this category too because it's clear that a single signal can have two very different intents.

So for example, if a contact is added to your product, that could be a sign of growth, right? Now it's catching on organically, it's growing, more people are using it, fantastic. But if it's a new leader that's been added, maybe their title is VP or chief, then it's time to start doing your research because we've all had that experience where a new leader comes in and then wants to bring in the tool that they're most familiar with. So then you can go on the attack.

You can be proactive and start rolling out the red carpet for that new leader to demonstrate the value that this tool has already provided to their organization. On the reverse side, right, a contact leaves, okay? If it's a nobody, someone you haven't had a lot of experience with, maybe a free license, not gonna be a big deal. If it's your admin or champion, probably something you wanna act on.

But also if somebody leaves and you know that they have been super engaged with your product, this is a great contact to pass over to your new sales team and say, follow them and make sure wherever they land, you're able to bring that tool back into their organization. So the context and implied intent that you can infer, just based on those actions, can be really meaningful reasons to create plays and tactics depending on the person, depending on the team that you want working internally. Okay, here's an example of what this looks like in Lytho today. Years ago, we wired up GainSight so that when users with interesting titles like VP or director or chief are added to our product, we're generating a playbook with a templated email.

And then depending on the segment, that email was either automatically sent or manually personalized by the CSM. Over the last year, we've been trying to build on top of that. First, we rebuilt all of our GainSight playbooks, actually injecting prompts into them that can be used with co-pilots and custom GPTs that we had created that aligned with each to help personalize the templating and personalize those actions. But now we've been taking that even further.

Now we're interpreting the license type, the title, and the account role that we all have logged so that we can interpret that scenario to be a growth signal. So for example, it's a healthy account, a free user's been added, and they have a title that matches our ICP. That now goes over to our growth team instead of the customer success team. And now that we have this wired up and tested with success, the hope is we're gonna be able to take this one step further and I'm looking at that GainSight MCP and run this prompt automatically in the background so that the email and playbook is served up to the CSM or the growth team member already created and they can just approve it and send.

Here's an example of what this looks like in GainSight today. So that VIP contact is added, the playbook generates, the prompts provided, and then we can use AI to come up with that hypothesis about who they are, what's their background, how is Lytho going to add value to their specific role and use that to deepen our relationship and product expansion from there. And since we're smart with health scoring and tracking contacts, when we're ready to have a growth or renewal conversation, we already have that contact data lined up so that we're able to take that and create a multi-threading strategy. We understand who should be in our buying committee.

We can formulate the discovery questions that need to be asked or what additional modules may meet and create solutions for their needs. Okay, moving on. Number two is industry intent. And this one is about knowing your customer's world better than they expect you to.

We know regulatory and compliance shifts can be a very high urgency signal, so if a mandate drops or a policy changes that impact your customer base, your customers are going to be stressed about it. And if you show up already knowing about it, already thinking about how that might impact the use of your product, the conversation is going to be completely different than if they brought it to you. Sector trends can also be important, right? If you serve a specific industry or you serve a lot of different industries, each one of those is likely to have its own budget cycle, its own seasonality.

And these can dictate how decisions get made or when technology mandates are going to shift priorities. And having this kind of vertical fluency can help your team dictate or accelerate expansion and ROI conversations that they have. So the activation of this is actually pretty straightforward for us. We have used Cloud Cowork to build industry-specific triggers that help us understand what is happening with each industry at a macro level, and then design the tactical plays that may make sense for that moment and disperse them to the team.

Here's an example of how we put that into practice. We knew ADA Title II deadline was coming up this spring, and that impacted every single higher-ed institution in our book of business. So we got ahead of it. We sent a VPAT, which is an accessibility confirmation document, proactively to these accounts.

Here's where LYTO stands on accessibility and included an invitation to a webinar where we featured two customers that already got in ahead of this themselves. And this email, great. It's delivering value. Love that.

We love being proactive for our customers. But it's also creating an opportunity for us to assess the signals that customers are demonstrating. If a customer is clicking on that email, if they're attending the webinar, and they don't have every module that may help them meet accessibility guidelines, that's an opportunity. They're showing engagement.

Now we can walk through the door that they've already opened, and we were able to set several meetings from this. I want to share one other thing that's not necessarily in system activation or playbook, but instead it was a hiring decision that I made. When we built the customer success team and when I built the customer growth team, I made a deliberate bet to stop teaching the industry and instead hire people that came from the industries that we serve. And what that unlocks is instantly, they're already speaking our customers' language from day one and establishing instant credibility of who they are and how we can help them.

It means discovery questions can go deeper, faster. They've also have created this network effect. When their peers see that they have joined our company, maybe they get a little bit more interested in purchasing from life though, but we also have improved our esteem in the industry at large. It shows and demonstrates that we care deeply about the problems that we're solving and that we want to hire to that end.

And third, now our new team members can ramp in weeks and not months, because I did not have nine months to prove out that I was gonna be able to hit my revenue target numbers. So they walked into that first customer call already with the credibility and enormous competitive advantage that I really desperately needed as I was building this new motion. I added this also because industry signals aren't just about watching the market. It can be about building a team that knows how to interpret the signals when they come up and understand innately what to do or the context behind it when they see a signal occur.

Okay, moving on to number three, product engagement intent signals. And this one is very personal to me. Obviously I came and started at this company as a product manager, and the product is literally telling you what your customers are thinking every single day. Most of us just aren't able to listen at the scale that we need to.

So of course you can dig into signals like what features are being used, what features are not being used. And hopefully everyone in this room has built this into their health scoring and built programmatic campaigns around this. If you haven't, great place to start. But now when a customer starts clicking on a premium feature they may not have access to, or trial features, they are hitting capacity thresholds.

Those are the things that I've started to pay attention to, because this is the product doing the discovery work for us. I just needed to make sure that my growth team was plugged into this. So this is actually where I started when I first got into the role, because if we weren't operationalizing this, we were missing major intent. So the first place I honed in on here was our in-app guide strategy.

Now you don't need your product to look like Las Vegas, but if your customers can't understand everything you have to offer as a company without, like in the product itself, right, they shouldn't have to talk to somebody about the services and additional modules that are available. If you can't see that in the product, you do have a major problem. So I set off to campaign on creating more experiences that would help educate our customers on the different kinds of problems that we solve. If you think about where customers are interacting with a product that may create that next tipping point for growth, that's where I wanted to focus my in-app experiences.

And then once the in-app guides or gated pages were created, we would build them with intense signal creation in mind. And I did a lot of partnership with product and marketing team to build these alerts in the product and then wire them up to make sure they were brought into Gainsight so that our team would know exactly what to do the moment that trigger fired. And by the way, this is the exact slide format that I use in a senior leadership team meeting to get the buy-in from marketing and product to own in and buy in on this strategy. And build the trust that if they built this, it would be acted on by my team.

So here's what this looks like in our product today. If a customer doesn't have a specific module, they now see an upsell page. And if they click chat with us, we now instantly are able to book a meeting with a member of our customer growth team. But the part I love most is if they click watch demo more than three times in a 30-day period, and that could be different people across the account clicking on watch demo, that's a different kind of signal.

And we're firing off a different automated sequence to try to generate more interest and book that meeting to have the conversation about expanding. So this is in constant discussion with products and marketing. And they are always gonna be more likely to prioritize these conversations if they understand what they're doing, then connects back to growth and revenue, and that they trust that you will actually do something with these experiences once they build them. Okay, one more product signal before I move on to the next category.

And I think this one doesn't get enough credit is customer feedback, because we know it's coming from everywhere. It's coming from support, it's coming from NPS, it's coming from every single channel. And you have to stop treating this as a support opportunity, and it's good to collect it, but it's got major, major potential, actually, as a growth signal. Because if you can log it, and then once it's delivered, you can close the loop, and you can tell them that it was delivered, it completely changes the nature of the relationship you can have with your customer.

We've automated this process between JIRA and Gainsight. So for every product launch that hits something that somebody has requested, we can ensure that we email them automatically with the relevant release notes included. So this conversation then builds trust, the customer feels heard, which is rarer than ever in this day and age, and it creates a natural opening for the expansion conversation, because if they cared enough to ask for it, they're probably ready to use it, or have a conversation about what that would mean to upgrade to use of that feature. Okay, number four is market intent signals.

And what's really interesting about this category in particular is in general, customer success has the least ability to get this data today, specifically digital intent signals. So your customer's probably on your website right now viewing your pricing page. Do you know, raise in hands, does anybody know when their customer is looking at their website right now today? Okay, a few hands, that's great.

What about if they are browsing competitors on G2? How many people are getting those signals? Okay, one, two, three. Okay, what about if they are clicking through an interactive demo that's on the website?

Okay, a few more, that's great. So in most organizations, the mass majority of this room, the answer is no, you do not know when your customer is doing that, because that data generally lives over in marketing. And so this is where I get on my soapbox, and my giant soapbox here, because this really, really has to change. These digital intent signals belong in customer success hands.

And when an existing customer is researching, that's not a marketing moment. It's a relationship moment that needs to be acted on. And our teams are generally the right ones to respond to that. So try to get in the room with marketing leadership about this topic.

Try to get time with your G2CSM. Find your way there, talk to your manager about this kind of data, because these are the most interesting intent signals, whether that's for risk, right? They're researching competitors, or growth. Sometimes we have customers that don't, again, realize the solutions that we have to offer.

And if we know that they're researching for those exact solutions, we can swoop in to help. Another one related to this category is about merger and acquisitions activity. And I know if you have ever had to support a customer through a merger or an acquisition, this is a particularly traumatic time in a customer's life cycle. Sometimes you're on the winning side, and sometimes you're on the losing side, but certainly there are gonna be changes to procurement processes, the buying committee.

Your champion is going to be distracted at best, or completely disappear at worst. So if you find out about this activity on a renewal call or check-in call, generally that's gonna be six months too late, right? You've lost all of your ability to get proactive and get in there. So this is another great application that you can use AI to build the infrastructure to start looking out for these signals ahead of your customers letting you know.

Okay, one more way we've operated, operationalized this at Light though. So one of the things that I immediately also did when I started to get my hands on some of the new tools in our tech stack is take a look at SixSense, which has all of this amazing firmographic, technographic data on our customers. And I was able to take that and scrape it and actually bring it into Gainsight. So we now have a very educated hypothesis on all of the technologies our customers are using at scale.

And then when a customer is engaging with, when a customer success manager is engaging with a customer on a QBR, Strategic Business Review, they can confirm and strengthen that these are the things that a customer might wanna integrate with. It makes them feel like we know them even better than any information that they necessarily gave us. And to add on top of that, we can now target these for growth conversations because if they are using these tools and these integrations exist in modules that they don't have or a package that they aren't currently subscribed to, then that becomes a very natural tipping point as well for us to engage them in that conversation with their own context in mind. Okay, number five.

I've saved this one for last on purpose because it's actually the one that no algorithm will ever be able to replace. This is the signal that lives inside your team. Your customer success managers are in every single one of these customer calls that generally are structured conversations with recorded outcomes. And that data matters.

Hopefully you have that data feeding in automatically into your system. But what I've learned after years in this seat is the most critical information your customer success managers get is not gonna be in the recorded conversation. If they are in person, it's going to be on the way to the elevator. One last thing before you leave.

If they have a really good relationship with your champion, it's gonna be that moment where the champion says, hey, can you just stop the recording for a second? I wanna tell you what's really going on here. Okay, so those are the things that aren't getting recorded and not getting brought back into your CSP or gain site. And you cannot automate this.

You can only build a culture where your team knows how to listen for it and knows that when they hear it, it belongs in the system. We are huge adopters and believers in timeline for that exact reason with the willingness of our customer success team to then log that information back into the system. If you commit to that and you can get your team to commit to this, it will change the value of your gain site instance. And so that brings me to joint incentives, which is something that we've changed at LIFO to make a real difference because incentives shape behavior.

If you want CS Intel to flow back into the system, you have to make sure that people generating that have a reason to care about it. And if you're only measuring and rewarding your team on retention, they're gonna protect the relationships. They're not gonna work to develop them. So we've built a CSQL motion where CSMs are recognized and rewarded when they source opportunities that close.

And in fact, even if they don't source the opportunity themselves, any opportunity that comes in their book, they are gonna get rewarded for creating an experience where that customer is growing. And we lean on implementation for use case demos because when a customer meets the person that's actually gonna help solve their problems with a very specific use case, it also builds trust and creates more likelihood that they will buy. And so we also reward the implementation consultant. Sometimes that means that if a deal or customer growth deal closes, we're gonna be paying that out three times across our growth rep, the CSM, and the implementation consultant.

And that's fantastic. That's a good thing. It's worth it to us. It means we're focusing in on what matters.

And finally, operationalize this. If your team is gonna be a data source, you do need to treat them like one and build the handoff forms and the processes and mechanisms that either automatically feed this data in or allow them the opportunity to fill out the form with the information that's gonna make the most sense for you. We use a MediX-style framework in our sales team. And so those are the kinds of fields that we force our team to articulate what they actually know.

And when it does make it into the system, this is where it connects back to everything we talked about at the start of the framework. So this is a real example slide from our QBR deck. And remember how we started with the contact signals of who's joining and who's leaving. The single most powerful source of contact intelligence we have is actually the customer success manager.

So if they can feed in and confirm it back in Gainsight, back in the CSP, where these roles are, we can confirm the hypothesis we build with AI on the growth team and create smarter growth tactics. And so it just continues to fuel that flywheel. So you've heard the five signal categories. You're probably thinking, oh, I don't wanna boil the ocean, where do I start?

And I would encourage you to start with the signals that are already coming in, because those are where you can start to really think of intent behind them. And what may make most sense to operationalize for risk, and what may make the most sense to operationalize for growth. So if you go back and you look at your lost accounts, if you go back and look at the accounts where you were able to claw back the churn, maybe you had forecasted they turn and you save them. If you go back and look at the deals that drove expansion, those signals that occurred before that activity occurred is generally gonna be a repeatable pattern that you can operationalize.

And then lean on the signals that you already have access to in each one of these categories to start building your flywheel. Now it's only early Q2, it's early for us on this journey. Our team is new and the signal framework is new. We're still building and iterating and finding the edges of what works.

But here's what I can show that in the first four months of the year, we've already generated five times the pipeline of what we generated at this point last year, and closed our highest revenue quarter in five quarters, and our highest cross-sell quarter in seven quarters. So I share that because it is starting to work, right? I'm getting early traction here, it's very exciting. And I wanted to share this with you.

So now I fixed the NRR pyramid, right? We now have our five signal categories, and this is how we're building towards what we're calling our new customer experience OS. A dashboard where CSMs will be able to come in to everyday, understand what's in their inbox, what's trending, what to prioritize, what to share. And the gain site MCP, and actually a lot of what we heard about this morning is gonna make that a whole lot more possible for us.

So some key takeaways, clarity beats data. You don't need more signals, you just need the system to tell you what to act on. Intent should belong to customer success now. If marketing figured this out first, AI has now given us the infrastructure to catch up.

Your signals should be treated as a flywheel, not a checklist. Each of these categories were reviewed, feed into each other. Your history is your roadmap. If you understand what killed you, what saved you, what grew you, that data is gonna help you point towards where to start.

And then I deeply do believe that you have to earn the right. You have to prove out that reoccuried impact before you can create the exponential revenue. So build that trust first and the revenue will follow. Okay, thank you.

(audience applauding) That was a great way to end the day, so we'll do some Q&A. Probably just a couple, because Brittany had a lot to share earlier, so we only have a few minutes. All right. Okay, that's a good one.

How did you ensure that the roles were clear between your team, the CSMs, and the sales team owning Net New Business? You mentioned-- Yeah, so I talked a little bit about the incentive plans that we've created. We have very well-defined frameworks that we've worked out with our CFO between Net New Sales and the growth team. And generally, most of the opportunities that the CSMs are passing are gonna be for their own customers, for their own books.

If there's ever a question, we can use the CFO as kind of our neutral referee that doesn't have a stake in the game. But the CSMs are not doing anything commercial. So they know that their ability is they can pass off that commercial question or ask to our team now. We're gonna take that load off their plate, and then we're gonna trust the CSM to ode the relationship, really focus in on adoption and building trust.

I am a huge believer in the kind of that good cop, bad cop dynamic. I want the customer to know that somebody's advocating for them, that someone has their best interest in heart. And then if we need to have a somewhat tense renewal conversation or commercial conversation on the growth side, we can do that without hurting the relationship the CSM has built. Great.

So who's responsible for tracking industry trends or intense signals in your org? I've been building a lot of this myself. Using Clod Cowork has been a game changer. I mean, it's so instantly accessible.

You do have to iterate on it. You cannot take the first thing that Clod is giving you. You need to research it, you need to validate it. And then oftentimes when I see a signal, then that'll be something that we can report back up to the senior leadership team, discuss it, maybe do research, maybe there's marketing tactics that can be built upon that, or even product that can change because of signals that are happening.

So it really, anyone can tap into it, but I think in order for you to truly operationalize it, you then have to raise it up, make sure that's the right thing that you wanna focus on as an organization, and then you can build the plays around it. So how do you make sure that all these signals don't create data overload? Yeah, I mean, I think that's where you really have to fiercely prioritize, and you can't ask your team to do everything at once. So I think it is our job as leaders to get our hands around these things, understand them and prioritize where you want your team's focus to be.

I spend a lot of time trying to create focus and direction for my team, so they can do what they do best. And I'm providing them the guidance from up top to say, okay, here's the direction that we're going in. With the intent signals specifically, for the growth team, it's gonna come in as different automated emails that are hopefully then generating an email that just lands on their calendar as well. So it's not asking them to go and do manual tasks, it's creating the conditions where people are then gonna come inbound.

So did you try anything that didn't work, a signal that ended up not yielding the results that you were expecting? Yeah, so one of the ones that I talked about at the very beginning around the contact signals is we did try to spend some time at the very beginning personalizing those emails with context to go and then send it out. And it actually, we weren't filtering out the context deeply enough. So we had brought in manager as a title.

Well, it turns out that we were getting dozens and dozens and dozens of managers being added to the application, and that was not gonna be a good use of our time to go and target conversations at that level. So we very quickly said, okay, not a good use of our time. Let's move on. How do you delineate a growth rep from a CSM in the customer discussions?

How do you explain that to them? Are there any common misunderstandings, either from the customer's perspective or between the CSMs and the growth reps, just to help the customers understand? I think customers can always naturally kind of wonder, okay, who do I go to and what scenario? And we would prefer that they default to the customer success manager if there's ever a question.

The customer success manager is going to be their triage and bring in whoever is necessary, whether that's gonna be support or the growth leader, maybe a member of the product team even, depending on what the need is. And so we do try to be really clear at the very beginning when we're onboarding customers, here are all the teams that we have to support you, but we never try to make them feel bad, or it's kind of a great thing if they're coming to their CSM and they know, okay, this is the person I can go to, and they're gonna direct me to where I can get the help that I need. All right, last one. Are all of these signals that you were talking about associated with Gainsight CTAs, and has that overwhelmed the team at all, or how do they work through that?

So not necessarily. So one of the things I didn't talk about is, I do try to join the signal with the health scoring. So as much as possible, feeding back into, is this gonna be a good measure of this customer's health in all of these signals, right? If you can really understand, some need action, some are just gonna say, okay, things aren't looking so hot right now, and if enough of them compound, then that may drive its own activity.

So I think we would all drown if every single signal resulted in a new CTA for someone to act on. So where we can automate, we automate. If we can automate an email sequence that's contextualized, fantastic. What we actually believe needs human attention because enough has compounded that we believe that customer is unhealthy, or enough has compounded that we believe there's a real amazing growth opportunity to act on, that's when we prioritize human action.

All right, I think that'll be our last one. Another round of applause for Brittany. Thank you. Awesome.

(audience applauding) Just a reminder to please give some feedback on this session by hitting survey. We go to the session in the agenda and hitting survey. Reminder for the Pulse Party tonight, it is at Solaya nightclub at 7 p.m. Please bring your ID and your badge.

You will need both to get in. It's at the Vanderpump Hotel, which was the Cromwell last year. If you're at Pulse last year, same place. Same nightclub.

Looking forward to it, and we'll see you all at the party or tomorrow. Thanks so much for your day, everyone.