The Outcome-Led CSM: How AI Turns the Sales-to-CS Handoff Into a Retention Advantage

[Speaker 1]
Hi everyone, thank you for joining our session today on the Outcome-Led CSM. So today we're going to walk you through how we at Workday are looking to combine AI signals combined with smarter handoffs to transform the way that we look at the customer lifecycle. So we all know that this is one of the boldest moves that can go horribly wrong within SaaS, so hopefully we're getting this right and we're on the way on our journey.

So quick introduction, who I am, I'm Craig Ringland, I lead one of our UK teams, the customer success teams here in London. So I've got a team of 11 CSMs that are split between London and Poland, based on the segments that they work through. So together my team, we look after around 280 customers and that equates to around 400 million in revenue.

One of two teams in the UK and collectively we look after 500 customers, which is around 611 million in revenue. Now sharing those numbers with you, not to show off or brag that we've got a big book of business, but it gives you an idea of the complexity and the scale that we're working with just in one of our markets. And when we look back at our traditional handover methods and also the way that we manage our customer lifecycle now, it's simply not working and not where we need it to be.

So today we're going to walk you through our journey around how we're looking at our own internal AI tooling, which is go-to-market companion, and combining that with the power of GainSight Staircase and GainSight MP to change the way that we're managing the customer lifecycle. So with me today is my colleague Nancy Brave, who is our internal GainSight guru. I know she hates hearing that, but Nancy's joining us today from our head office in Pleasanton.

So welcome.

[Speaker 2]
Thank you, Craig. My name is Nancy Brave. I'm very excited to be here this afternoon with all of you.

I'm a senior manager of customer success and collaboration systems. It doesn't roll off the tongue, but that's what I do. We do manage GainSight and other tools for our field, not CRM, but the important ones.

So we're super excited to be here to tell you all about how we turn tooling in to help improve our sales to service handoff. So Craig, let's go.

[Speaker 1]
And probably like many of you in this room, we all probably suffer from the same problem. Sales know exactly what success the customer wants from your platform. But somehow between the ink drying on that contract and us coming in and saying our first hello, a lot of that context gets lost and falls through into cracks and out leaky buckets.

So we're going to walk you through today how we're looking to close that leaky bucket and turn that, capturing all that information and turning that into our retention advantage. But first of all, we'll give you an outline of what our journey is going to look like today. And we're going to start at the beginning where we think things start to go horribly wrong.

And that can be sometimes during that transition period from sales to CS.

[Speaker 2]
Yep. And then we're going to tell you what it should look like. We're calling it the dream handoff.

If you get to the gold at the end of the journey, your treasure, that's what we're going to paint the picture for you.

[Speaker 1]
And then we're going to share with you what our vision looks like, which what we call our AI driven outcome spine, which brings all of our technology together and how we're using those signals to get a better handle on where our customers sit and how we can manage them proactively going forward.

[Speaker 2]
And of course, the key here is retention, adoption and retention. That's what we're here to talk about. So we really want to show how this particular system and AI spine can help CSMs drive adoption and retention better.

So Craig, let's go.

[Speaker 1]
Let's go into it. So a little bit more about who we are and what our numbers are.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, let's level set a little bit on Workday. Workday is a 20 year old HCM and financials company that's based, of course, in the cloud. We have over 13,000 customers globally and 500 plus CSMs. Workday as a company is all about AI. So we are using a lot of the AI tools that we said to our customers. We're also building a lot of things for our own work improvement internally, which is part of what you're going to see here. So again, to Craig's point, not to brag, we just want to make sure you have kind of an understanding of where we're coming from when we talk about our journey.

Off you go.

[Speaker 1]
Let's get to it. So let's start at that very, very beginning stage. Now, in our business, we all probably feel the same thing.

Churn or risk is not something that loudly announces itself. It slowly starts to creep up and it builds up to a point when all of a sudden it can hit you without actually realising you've got it there. So we call it a little bit of a silent killer.

So the idea is how do we get a better handle? How do we get a better idea of what that transition looks like? Because we know that sales during that whole pre-sales process can spend months, in our case at Workday, sometimes years, uncovering all of this customer information.

But the minute that contract is signed, a lot of that intelligence gets lost. It ends up buried in emails. It ends up lost in recorded calls.

And God forbid, it ends up trapped in somebody's head. We haven't quite worked out how to get into somebody's head yet. But when we started to look at our global handover process internally, there was five key friction points that generally raised their head.

And it was always around incentive misalignment and context drop, the rediscovery trap, loss of stakeholder mapping, unclear promises and expectations, and inconsistent and manual processes. And they were pretty consistent across our whole global business. So when we unpack this in a little bit more detail, if we start with incentive misalignment and context drop, as I was saying before, sales, or net new sales in particular, is measured on closing a deal.

Once that deal is closed, they move completely on to that next conversation. CS, customer is often thrown over the fence, and we're left with very little information, sometimes a blank sheet of paper to start with. You're nodding your head.

And it leads us to that second point of that rediscovery trap. There is nothing worse than arriving at a customer meeting and your first meeting going, oh, please tell me, customer, what are your goals? What are your objectives?

When they've just spent months or years telling our salespeople exactly what we want. And with that, we have to start to rebuild that whole stakeholder map. Who are our decision makers?

Who are our BAU contacts? Because that relationship hasn't necessarily carried forward. And then you get into that whole journey stage with the customer, and then the unclear expectations start to come out.

The promises that were made during the same cycle. Those areas that you have to then go in and deliver upon. And when we put these all together, they weren't necessarily things that happened in isolation.

They were there because we had inconsistent and manual processes. We had no connective tissue that ran across all of these areas of that sales cycle. So you end up with your CSM starting from a point of actually looking at inward focus activities, talking internally around how we find out that information, rather than focusing outwardly with your customers driving outcomes from the very get go.

So we actually took a little bit of a step back. What if we could turn every customer interaction into a conversation that was driven by an outcome? Because this little picture here hit a little bit too close to home.

This is us as a CSM going to our first customer meeting. We're running across that bridge of knowledge, like Indiana Jones, and all of that knowledge that was the rungs of the bridge were falling into the abyss. We know the AI had the context.

We know that the, oh sorry, not the AI, we know the salesperson had the context. We know the information was in an email, but it was trapped, it was hidden away. So we needed to think about how do we rebuild this bridge so that bridge retains all of that context, that gets us from point A to point B so we can start a customer meeting with information rather than just purely, than a pure blank page.

But what we want to do, we want you to all get your phones out now. It's time for Slido. It's time for a poll.

[Speaker 2]
Of course. Who doesn't love a good poll? My background is market research.

So in your own company, CSM or not, ops, wherever you're coming from, where do you think your sales to service handoff is on the continuum of we've got it all completely mapped out, we know end to end what's happening to what are you talking about, handoff, what's that? So go ahead and hit your phones. I'm sorry, it's in the Pulse app.

You see the Q&A, go ahead and answer, give us an answer.

[Speaker 1]
I love this interactive way.

[Speaker 2]
I know, it's kind of fun. It's kind of looking like we're getting sort of rough outline unmapped. Nobody's really, thankfully down here at the bottom and unfortunately nobody's really up here and we just know everything.

So I feel like, Craig, we're all in a pretty similar boat here with what we've been talking about. You're having way too much fun watching the slide.

[Speaker 1]
I want to know who's fully mapped.

[Speaker 2]
There you go. We'll talk later.

[Speaker 1]
Excellent. We'll catch up with you afterwards. And the rest of the room.

[Speaker 2]
Of course.

[Speaker 1]
Excellent.

[Speaker 2]
All right. Let's continue.

[Speaker 1]
Well, good to know that we're not necessarily alone in this journey that we're on. So the next thing we want to look at here is how we're looking to start rebuilding that dream. How do we rebuild the bridge, which is a bit of a dream that we're aiming for that whole dream handoff.

And taking those five key friction points, we wanted to break it down into ways of addressing those five key points. So looking at that first one there, how do we capture that context at the source? So there were ways that we are focusing internally around those conversations that are happening with sales.

How do we ensure that they are tracked and they are recorded and they are documented as they happen? So we're doing a lot of internal tooling within that captures things such as Clary calls that goes into our customer CRM within Salesforce. So this way, we're not relying on an AE who is out celebrating their deal to beg them to try and get those handover notes and what that looks like.

We've already got that history. We've already got that context. And that leads us to that point where we don't need to do the same level of rediscovery that we previously had to do in the time because all that context is carried forward.

So we end up going into the customer and actually starting from the point of consulting with them rather than actually just reacting with them and asking them the same questions that they've gone through with discovery. And with that, because we have that historical context, we understand what the relationships look like. We know who our decision makers were.

We know who our contacts are because they have been carried forward with all of the information that has been tracked and documented as we go through this journey. But more importantly, it gives us exposure. It surfaces to us the promises that have been made during that sales cycle because there's often quite a few of them.

But we have an understanding of how we need to work through those commitments that have been made and what are the timelines that have been promised. And then we end up to a point which we're aiming to get to where we have one thread that is automatically updated. So how do we know when signals are coming through, that information is dynamically being created that drives and builds the success plan based on where the customer is and the point in their journey so we can actually pick up and move that forward?

But first of all...

[Speaker 2]
The question, how do we get there? We're leaning into the journey theme if you didn't notice. The question is how do we get there without a map?

AI is new. This is all new to all of us. So we had to figure out what to do.

[Speaker 1]
So we created a map. And forgive me, this is not a biology lesson. So if any of you had trauma in high school, I apologize if I bring that back.

So this is where we start to bring in our internal tool, which is called Go-To-Market Companion, which we affectionately call the brain. And how do we start to combine that with the AI technology that sits within Gainsight, which is what we staircase AI, which we call the heart. And then eventually in time we're going to be implementing Gainsight MCP, which is where we're going to call the hands.

Now, this is what we call our AI supported outcome spine. And it's a closed loop ecosystem that is within our mapped AI ecosystem that sits within our sales business, which is a combination of sales and also a customer success globally. So in terms of how all three of these interact together, so the brain, GTM Companion, that catches all of the information that that sales context layer.

So it feeds all the information that we have. So CSMs can actually pull that information down and start with the customer's objectives in mind, rather than having to go back and rediscover it. It pulls in all of that information, all of that context.

So the CSMs in a much stronger position from day one. Staircase AI, that is what we are using to monitor the health of our customers. And pardon the pun, but it's actually measuring the pulse of our customers.

It's tracking all of the sentiment that happens within. It's sending off signals which move around this ecosystem and it enables us to catch a wobble early that we can start to then go in and start putting a remedy process in place. The area that we're most excited for is the hands, because that's where we really start to get time back.

So we know that globally our CSMs probably spend around 19% of their time doing admin. So we're administering customers rather than advising and consulting with our customers. So we want to get to the point where we're lifting that admin burden from our CSMs, where CTAs are being automatically updated, where timelines are being automatically updated, where success plans are being dynamically updated.

This is what helps us give that time back so we can be outcome focused, which gives us that foundation that helps us become outcome led as we move forward. Now looking at this map here, it sounds really easy when you say it fast and how it all comes together, but it's far more complicated at the back end. And Nancy's going to take us through around how all these interact together in a much more technical layer.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, not much more technical. So go-to-market companion or just companion, we call it our brain. This is really our internal bespoke LLM and we've been building this for a couple of years now.

And in addition to what you see up here, we have health scores, we have enablement information, event information, account and adoption plans, telemetry, all kinds of things that go into this. We have over 1.5 billion data points in here and we're adding more all the time, which is why we call it the brain. What's really cool about this is a couple of things.

In addition to just sucking in all of the data, we have personas built into the tool. So when you log into the tool, it knows who you are, essentially. It knows what kind of job you are doing or trying to do.

The other piece of this is workflows and the team has built exceptionally detailed workflows, like 30-page prompts for different types of deliverables within companion. So examples would be an account brief or a risk retention conversation starter or I don't know, take your pick. Anything like that, like an executive briefing.

What's really cool when you have a persona and workflow together, that's really where a lot of the power comes in because a salesperson can get an account brief tailored to a sales conversation where customer success can get an account brief tailored to an adoption and retention conversation. So we're really using companion to pull all this data together to look at the hard facts and information and be able to provide that up upon request to our CS. Next up, that was our brain.

Now we're moving down to the heart. This has been a really interesting journey to get to Staircase. And I will be quite frank, we are not that far into it.

We are still in that pilot stage. And I'll talk about the history of that in just a minute on the next slide. What we're doing with Staircase, Craig alluded to it, is really we want Staircase to be the monitor, to be out there listening to conversations, looking for sentiment, looking for triggers, looking for risk, looking for retention, concerns, adoption, expansion, opportunities.

So Staircase, as you I'm sure all know, monitors all of the conversations and all of the calls and all the emails and all of the things and pushes information back to CSMs or whoever's looking at it through widgets and Salesforce and whatnot, really to identify things like stakeholder sentiment change or like I said, potentially a retention or risk conversation that came up and feed that out to our CSMs through nudges and things like that.

We're in the pilot side, so we're not even on the right-hand side of this slide. We have been piloting for, I don't know, a month or so, maybe a little bit longer, and I'll talk about how it's been received by our team on the next slide. The short answer is it's been amazing.

We are going to be out of pilot hopefully in the next couple of weeks and launching this to all of our 500 plus CSMs as well as the rest of the field. We're really excited about where we're going with all of this and how this fits into our broader tech stack. But like I said, it wasn't easy to get here.

The long and winding road to Staircase was exactly that and I don't think this is news to anybody. We at Workday had to do a lot of reviews. We had to do an AI review because of course AI needs guardrails and you need to make sure that it is not pulling out things that are not accurate or making things up as much as you can.

Privacy and security, very, very important. Make sure your data is not at risk, you're not losing PII, all of those really important things, really detailed review. Our architecture review, which was looking at how does Staircase fit into our overall tech stack at Workday and in our go-to-market whole team.

And then we were required, after all of that, we're required to do a pilot, which is where we are right now, and then we're launching. Let me get out of the way. You can read the quotes over here on the right, you don't need to read through me, but these quotes came from the first week of our pilot and it's talking about our CSMs and our CS leaders love the insights, they love the information that's getting pushed out, they get a weekly report of dark accounts or accounts where there's been no engagement, where there's a sentiment risk, where maybe a stakeholder is no longer there, and so some of these are found a churn customer in the first 24 hours of our pilot. So there's been some really amazing, I call it the treasure at the end of the road of when this gets out to all of our customers, it's going to be really amazing.

And what's even better, but equally awesome about this is our sales team, they are not in Gainsight, they have heard and they have seen what's coming out of Staircase in our very short pilot, and they are reaching out and asking how can we connect, how can we put our emails in, how can we make sure that the conversations we're having are shared and vice versa, how can we get access to these insights. So that has been actually surprising to me, surprising and amazing outcome of all of that.

So that's our Staircase journey. Then next up, Craig talked about MCP, this is where we're going, we are not here yet because we're going through the review road, so we're working on it, but really what we want to do is combine Brain and MCP and Staircase to really say to the CSM, here's an opportunity to expand or drive more or here's a risk potentially of churn or whatnot, go do something about it. And so MCP is going to help us do something about it by either creating an objective, sending a notification, potentially drafting an email, maybe you have companion draft an email, push it to the CSM, the CSM human in the loop, we're not going to have it automatically send, we're going to make sure somebody looks at the email and goes, yeah, that looks right, and then sends it off to the customer. So we've got a lot of plans for MCP, we're not quite there, but we're getting a whole lot closer and we're really excited with what this is going to bring to us.

Go ahead, back to anatomy.

[Speaker 1]
And I guess more importantly for you all here, what does this mean for all of you in the room on a Monday afternoon here at Pulse around becoming an outcome-led CSM? And like I said, we're bringing it back to three primary principles here. It's like the brain, the heart, and the hands.

And we have a little dance for that, but we won't do it for you. So for us, for the CSMs, the brain, GTM companion, it helps our CSMs be outcome-led from day one. So they're actually inheriting the outcomes that the customer has actually said that they're looking to achieve from workday.

The heart allows or monitors the sentiment that happens within the account. It's always there surfacing all the time. It's bringing both positive, it's bringing growth, it's bringing opportunities, it's bringing in risk.

So by having that sentiment continually monitored, it gives the CSM signals where to act upon. Also when Nancy was saying, we've got some sales people that are in the account. Sales are really interested with the data that is coming through around sentiment.

Yes, you've got to go through and check that it is all accurate and it is aligned. There are some areas that we are refining that we're working through, but by continuously being able to manage that sentiment, we can start to pick up those wobbles early. And that allows us then to act and it's surfacing up the data and the right insights where we need to act upon at that particular time.

But the hands, the hands is what really is going to help CSMs make that shift to become outcome-focused. Like some of the sessions here that we've been talking about today, it's around how do we combine AI and how do we combine the talent of the CSM. And if we can free up administration time from a CSM, it allows them to actually focus and consult with the customer.

And that's where we see the retention advantage happening because they're actually being more involved with their customers and driving those outcomes that is going to get to the customer to the point where they can actually start to see real ROI with their product. So this is one of the reasons why we're looking forward to getting MCP on board just to free up CSM's time because an hour we give back to them, it's an hour they can be spent consulting with their customers. So if we looked at some of the takeaways for today's session before we jump into Q&A, some of the things that were there.

[Speaker 2]
It's obviously data. That's what I love to talk about. Capture as much data as you can, as early as you can, and as much as you can along that whole entire customer journey.

Obviously in order to help drive retention you have to know what the issues might be that are coming up from the customer, what they've said in early conversations. So getting as much data as you can in there is always good.

[Speaker 1]
And automate the admin and humanize the value. Nothing can actually replace, like we were saying before about that human in the loop, but nothing can actually replace the connection that your CSM's will actually have with your customers. That's where a lot of that value is driven in building that relationship with the customer and not administering the customer.

[Speaker 2]
Yep. And then the last piece is around signals. Obviously if your system is built to recognize potential issues, pushing signals to CSM or whomever it's going to be that there may be something they want to pay attention to, there may be expansion opportunities, there may be a retention problem, that will again allow CSM's to have more time to have those conversations versus doing the research on the other end going, why did they say they're going to leave? I don't know. And going back and spending hours and hours researching, it's just pushed to them.

That's what the signal driven part is about. And that's where the value is and really the whole system that we're talking about here.

[Speaker 1]
And then we end up in a situation where we have happy CSM, happy technology. They're all working together. We've rebuilt that bridge and they're all running together in harmony on their way to their first customer meeting with all the information intact, ready to go.

So this is our utopia where we want to get to. And that way they can all arrive at the customer meeting happy. But thank you for taking the time to come to our session today.

And we're here for any questions you might have.

[Speaker 3]
Thank you very much, Nancy and Craig. So we've got some time for some questions now. So these all have already been submitted on Slido.

You can still submit questions and then upvote as well. But yeah, great presentation. I love the body analogy and kind of shame that we didn't get to see the dance, right?

It's easy.

[Speaker 2]
He'll do it.

[Speaker 3]
So first question is from Matt who says, our organization is currently focused on post-sales handoff. So this is very relevant. What tips can you give us to avoid some of the pitfalls that you've encountered when setting up this process?

[Speaker 1]
It's an interesting one with this one. It's like one of the pitfalls is there needs to be governance on the sales side as well for this to really work properly. We need to get information out of salespeople's notebooks, out of their heads and into an actual platform that this data can actually pull from.

So it's how do you get that governance right to make sure that sales are actually putting the information in the right places. But it's when you start to, like this is one of the things that we particularly in the UK office where we started to get a lot of the salespeople on board is because we started to show them some of the insights that we're pulling through from staircase. And particularly like when we're talking about earlier today, the long tail segment, they could see some real benefits there of being able to see certain signals in accounts which were dealt with in volume.

So some of the pitfalls was probably not sharing information. It's how do you work with them together? And I think now we're probably at a much stronger advantage because CS at Workday now sits in the sales organization.

So there was a lot more conversations that happen in that space. So just making sure that everybody is connected and actually telling them what you're doing and what is the relevance of the data that you're pulling. And more importantly, how it's going to help them earn more money.

[Speaker 2]
Well, and I also think from a technology perspective, obviously AI is not perfect, right? If we're lucky, it's 90% right. So you have to have a mechanism to really vet what it's telling you if you're throwing all this information into a system.

It's part of what we're doing in the staircase pilot actually is we're making, we have 55 CSMs, I think, in the pilot and a couple hundred customers. And all of the CSMs are going through and looking at the output of staircase AI and staircase, the topics they're listening to in conversations and telling us if it's right or wrong. So we're doing a lot of work to fine tune that.

And I think in any system you have, that's definitely a pitfall because if you start having information in there, that's feeding off of information, it's not right, right? You go down this path of misinformation that just gets more and more overblown. So I think those are kind of two of the biggest pitfalls.

[Speaker 3]
Yeah, I love this. This next question in terms of who actually owns this internally and how much expertise do you need? So yeah, 10 upvotes there.

[Speaker 1]
Nancy, answer.

[Speaker 2]
That is a really interesting question. At Workday, the go-to-market companion is owned by go-to-market systems. So that's the broader team that I am part of.

That's the sales and service combination systems team. IT is involved in terms of the actual build, but we're sort of like the in-between. We take the business stakeholders.

It's not my team, it's another team, but they take the business stakeholders requirements and work with BT to do the prioritization and to do the actual build. We do have the AI review and we have AI groups in BT. So part of the review that companion did before it was released two years ago was around how does it fit into our broader AI stack.

So they're sort of monitoring it, but they're not actively involved in governance at this point. It's really mostly the systems teams working with the business specifically and the leaders of our revenue business and saying, okay, what's the next thing you want to do? Do you want legal to have their thing or do you want sales to have this other thing?

And they kind of make those decisions for us. Technical expertise, it wasn't me. I don't know.

The people who do it are not technical people. They learned it as they went. So it wasn't like we brought in a bunch of people who knew how to build everything in AI.

They didn't. They just figured it out.

[Speaker 1]
And the CS ops team doesn't run off by themselves. The CS leadership team is very involved in this process because we've got multiple different types of customer success teams across Workday and a lot of the leadership teams are involved in there from a viewpoint of where we need the platform to go. What are the risks that we need to manage?

What is the opportunity that we need to manage? So it is very much a cross-functional group that runs through this whole program. It's not something that's just one and done and run off on their own.

It's definitely, it's probably, I wouldn't even say how many people are involved in it from outside the 40 or 50 people that are involved.

[Speaker 2]
This one's all you.

[Speaker 3]
Nice. I think in my business, what I've seen is where it does work really well is cross-functionally, but also those different levels of people within the organization all being involved. So great that you mentioned that.

Next question is what information did you find most useful for sales to collect when handing over before the first CSM outreach?

[Speaker 1]
The biggest thing with that is it's like any platform. You go in and buy a platform. You're there to solve a particular business problem, and you're there to solve a particular, you want sort of success out of that.

So we see a lot of customers that buy Workday. It's like how are they managing their workforces? How are they managing their finance?

How are they managing their human and their agentic workforce together? And generally, it's underpinning a pretty big business change program. So it's understanding what those programs look like and what is the end objective.

And more importantly, what does the business see that this is going to be a success? That needs to be the North Star, and that needs to be underpinning in both of those ways. Because sometimes you can be handed, particularly smaller customers, what do they want to do?

Oh, they just want to manage their HR people. It's like, well, you're not actually solving a business problem in that way. So it's that real understanding, and some of the customers are phenomenal in mapping that out when you see it in that pre-sale stage is around this is what we're looking to solve for.

This is how the business is going to measure us. This is what we're going to see as success, and that needs to be the North Star that we need to be able to drive to and anchor on.

[Speaker 3]
This next one is a pain point I see regularly. So we have two handoff points. So sales to onboarding, then onboarding to CS, each having different systems, so Salesforce, internal apps, GainSight.

How do you limit the information between the teams being lost, I guess, all the way from sales to then that CS adoption piece?

[Speaker 1]
And we potentially have an additional layer in that as well, because a lot of our customers are implemented by external partners. So it's, how do we keep track of that? And I guess we've changed our go-to-market model this year, where we will actually assign a CSM when a customer first starts their onboarding, and the customer could be onboarding for a year.

So the CSM will sit on the periphery of that, so they can actually manage how that goes through. But in terms of how we're trying to capture and track that information, so we are moving to a point where, particularly, where we've got ClaryNext, which also integrates with GainSight and integrates into our Salesforce platform on the sales side. How do we capture those conversations as they happen?

How are we tracking emails throughout the whole ecosystem? So this is another thing where, particularly Staircase, just the ability to be able to track emails has proved massive value for our business, particularly on the sales side, because we can start to get a much more, I guess, a deeper 360 view of where the customer actually is and what that looks like. But also, it helps you remove some of those blind spots of those conversations that can happen during any time during a customer, whether it's during deployment or throughout the whole lifecycle.

The ability to remove those blind spots is pinnacle to being able to have a full view of your customer. But this is where we're using GTM Companion quite heavily as well. So as Nancy was saying, the 1.5 billion data points, that is tracking those interactions across that whole customer journey, pretty much from first call right through until we get to the point where they go through renewal.

[Speaker 2]
And also, our onboarding and implementation data is pushed into Salesforce. So that's very convenient. It's not the only tool that we use, but there's a lot of deployment, whether it's partner-led or workday-led, that's tracked in that tool centrally.

So we do have that available. So that's kind of one of our loss limiters.

[Speaker 3]
Nice. Nice. Thank you for that.

And I think the next question here, so then more on guardrails. So what guardrails have you installed in the case in case the AI workflows break and can't be fixed? And given the CSM team process are heavily dependent on AI automation, which is a great question.

[Speaker 2]
Well, they're not yet. So you've raised a really good point we need to think about. No, I'm being a little bit flippant.

When we get to the MCP point and we really are starting to push things like human in the loop and other information, we are going to have to either figure out how to have a backup or some way to circumvent this. I don't have a good answer because we haven't gotten to that point yet. I'm sorry.

I'll have to get back to you on that.

[Speaker 3]
Okay. And I think the next question, coming as a CSM, I mean, there's never over-commitment from sales. I will buy you a drink.

But yeah, this is a good question. So how do you manage over commitments from sales on features? But I guess, how do you manage that?

[Speaker 1]
Apart from going around and slapping them across the head? I don't know. This is the third SaaS company I've worked for.

And I just think it's just systemic. I've worked with people who sell things that aren't even on our SKU list before. It's one of those things that I can't even answer that quickly.

It's just like opening Pandora's box. It's like what's, yeah, trying to control them is, you know, I used to say, because in previous incarnations, I worked at LinkedIn, I used to sit with the sales team. And it's like, you guys go out and sell dreams.

And then we just come in and crush them. And that's basically what I have to remind them from that way. But that one's, I'd love to be able to answer that, but I cannot.

[Speaker 3]
Yeah. I don't think anyone's cracked that one yet, to be fair. And then how do you build the sales to sales to CS context if that's when you've implementations by partners?

So another good question.

[Speaker 1]
We have really strong relationships with our partners. The partners will probably bend over backwards to spend time with us, which is great. But this is where you want to have a really good relationship with your implementation partner, because they are your eyes and ears on the ground.

And you need to know exactly what is happening throughout that process. A lot of those partners will sometimes stay on and being their ongoing managing partner. So how do you work with them?

How do you do combined meetings with those partners? Just so each can see what is happening and everybody has that full context. So when we do get to that point, when the customer goes live, we've got a much stronger, I guess, a much stronger history of why the account is.

But more so, more importantly, what has changed throughout the whole implementation process. So we're not starting from zero.

[Speaker 3]
Nice. And then a question here from, so if you're capturing, sorry, the next one went up. So if you're capturing the data at the source, the capturing the data at the source has always been challenging.

What is your suggestions to encourage the sales, pre-sales and CSMs to log their data? I think you touched on it a little bit in terms of automation.

[Speaker 2]
For sales, I think it's money, right? It's however that's built into their compensation. And I was talking to somebody, I don't know if I remember who it was, who was talking about how their salespeople are now part of their MBO, part of their MBO is logging.

And so I think for some roles, that's the only way you're going to get it to happen. I think for everybody, seeing the value of what you get out of it versus what you put in, right? Logging data is really not that hard, especially these days, it's automated.

You've got gong, you've got whatever you've got. It really shouldn't be hard. So showing them, here's what you can get out of it when you take almost no time to put into it is, I don't think too hard of a sell, but I'm not in CSM.

[Speaker 1]
And the way that a lot of our calls are set up now, Clary automatically comes into a call. So that way it's capturing the information at that source. And Clary, because we've got the link in with Gainsight as well, particularly for CSMs, it automatically updates that timeline and creates a summary of that call.

So that's another point where you're giving that admin back. With sales, where they can, they do use Clary recorded calls. So that helps us catch that context.

And that helps us bring that in to go to Market Companion so we can start to get what some of those signals look like. And we're trying to keep our trigger words. So the trigger words that, I guess, calls flags within Clary that could be about risk or opportunity.

We're trying to keep the same naming convention with Gainsight. So we have the same kind of triggers that move all around through that ecosystem that I had up in there, a nice little biology map earlier.

[Speaker 3]
Yeah, I think just from being a CSM and looking back five years ago, and you had to log notes to now, and the level of automation, it helps you to be more proactive in what you're doing. No one likes logging notes. Which teams are using Gainsight besides CSMs?

So a bit more of a generic question.

[Speaker 2]
You want me to answer that question?

[Speaker 3]
You can.

[Speaker 2]
Okay, nobody, that's not entirely true. Gainsight, there's a Gainsight widget that is visible in Salesforce for our sales teams, our net new sales, customer-based sales, renewals team, managing partners, anybody else. But Customer Success is the only one who has a full license who's actively in there doing things, unfortunately.

[Speaker 1]
And the good thing too, particularly where we've connected people up with Staircase, they will get their own individual dashboard. And that's where it's really valuable for certain sales leaders to just come in and look across their territories or look at particular accounts. So they can actually go in and pull notes.

They can get a full history. They can have a look at what are some of the actions that need to take place. How could they get a summary of any risks that are involved in that account?

So they could actually come in to the Staircase dashboard and just prepare for an internal meeting without really having any full history or any access to Gainsight at all.

[Speaker 2]
Well, and actually I have to revise that. Sorry, because I wasn't thinking. Our sales people all have viewer analytics licenses that they get when they are onboarded.

I don't know that they all know that they have them, but they have them. So to Craig's point, when they start to see Staircase information, they do have the ability to go in and dig in deeper because they do have a license. It's just not a full license.

[Speaker 3]
The next question is more around data. Can you give us an idea of the complexity or challenges you face while integrating data from different sources?

[Speaker 2]
We only have five minutes, so I can't go too deep into this. I talked about the review cycles that we were facing for Staircase and any other tool and any other source of data has to go through a really, really deep and extensive review. So that takes a lot of time.

Challenges would be a couple of things. Mapping, making sure you're not duplicating. If you have three different sources that are giving you the same information, it's going to be a little bit confusing, potentially, for your AI.

Those are, I think, probably the biggest ones. And, of course, time. Our resources are limited.

So we have probably, I said, we're getting more and more requests to put things into companion all the time. We can't do them all. The companion team is only four people, and then the BT is actually fewer than that.

So there's a big backlog of things that people want to put into the system and subsequently get out. So I think those are the biggest challenges, is our review, which is the complexity, and then resource bandwidth. Okay.

[Speaker 1]
So are we involved in the sales cycle? Renewal cycle? Yes, we're always part of that renewal cycle.

Pretty much, we're always preparing that customer for renewal. New business? Not so much.

We do go in and we do talk to the value of customer success and what we bring as a team once that customer goes live. But in terms of new business pitches, we're not necessarily involved in many of those deals, but there is a subset where we will go in and talk to what happens with a customer once they go live on the platform. And we talk about the CS organization in that way.

But directly involved in new business sales? No. Renewals?

Yeah, we're always part of that process and upsell.

[Speaker 3]
That's an interesting one. Customers usually, they depend, as well, on the type of business. Ask, should our CSMs be involved, especially maybe at the end of that sales cycle?

But it varies from industry to industry. I think we've got time for maybe one more question here. So how long did it actually take you to implement this strategy in Workday?

So a couple of hours or? A couple hours.

[Speaker 2]
You just turn it on. Yeah, Companion's been around for about two years. Our staircase, long and winding road, off and on.

So this is not solid work with our review people. It was probably 12 plus months. And then we're still doing it.

So we're over two years now. It's been a lot of moving parts, and it's not going as quickly as we'd like, but we're making progress.

[Speaker 1]
And it's constantly evolving. So I don't think we'll ever fully implement it, particularly now we're going into this stage of tokenization and consumption. That's going to shift the way that we work in this role of customer success.

It's like we're moving away from activation to drive value. It's like now we're going to have to start looking at that movement towards what does consumption look like to drive value. So it's constantly a moving piece, and we are pushing Gainsight to help us on that journey as we go through and make that shift towards the world of tokenization.

[Speaker 3]
I just want to say thank you very much for your time, the presentation, answering those insightful questions as well. If everyone could put their hands together for Nancy and Craig from Workday. Thank you.

[Speaker 1]
Thank you all for coming today. Thank you.