What “Good” Actually Looks Like: Real Talk From Gainsight Admins

So we're going to get started, and we have a little bit of a piece of paper. Because Paul helped me a little. But we're going to start off with a little bit of an icebreaker for the panel. And if you want to play along with us too.

I like to always find out what people think about, what was your, if you could live in any time period, past, present, or future, what would it be and why? And yeah, so we'll start with you, Amanda. Oh, of course you would start with me. You would start next to me.

Let's see. I think, well, with everything going on right now, I would love to see the future and live in the future. I think to understand what our future looks like from an AI and customer success perspective and where our jobs are going to take us in the future. Nice.

Craig, what about yourself? You know, kind of similar to the AI thing, I think I'd also go back to when vehicles and cars were invented. Because nobody knew what was going to change with that. And how the world is going to operate under new ways of getting around in the machines and industrial type of world.

So I think kind of that wonder maybe prepares for what we're going through right now. Nice. Good answer. And Edgar, last but not least.

I will go back to the late 90s, early 2000s. Because I had a great life and I didn't know it. And I didn't appreciate it fully as a young person. And yeah, that would have been awesome to do again.

So if we ever can travel time and AI can help us, we know where we're going to go. I'm a middle ages guy, so I'm a Game of Thrones. So I'm not big enough to be a knight, so I'd probably be like a farmer that I would, you know. Anyway, now that we know that about it, when we're going to jump right in, what we're going to do is we're going to do a little bit of section for each panelist.

And they're going to share some of their experiences, challenges, and all other good stuff. And then once we're done, we'd love to have some questions from you guys. And we're just going to sort of freeform that. First up, we're not starting with you, so.

Oh, I'm sorry. Oh, okay. See, that's why I have mine here. I don't have them.

Anyway, yeah. Too much karaoke can do this. Okay, so let's jump in. We got Edgar first.

Fun. Surprise. So Edgar's going to specialize in talking about scale and strategy. And my question for you, Edgar, to start us off is, you've implemented at least 30 plus companies from startups to ADP and everything else.

When you think about working well, I'm sorry, what working well looks like at scale, what does that actually mean to you? So when I think about what works well at scale, what does that mean to me? So I think if I look back at, you know, all the implementations I've done, all the companies I've worked with, I think that trying to come in with like a specific solution for, like that repeats itself for everyone just doesn't work, right? Each company is different.

And I always say this, like, I have never implemented Gainsight exactly the same way anywhere I've been. Not once. At ADP now, our implementation looks extremely different than where I was before, which is IBM. And it makes sense.

IBM, you know, like, with the IBM Cloud, it's a consumption model. It has absolutely nothing to do with, you know, the way IBM does business. And so I would say that, like, coming in, understanding where you are, understanding the maturity level of the CS organization, of the actual company itself, and what they're ready to build, and what they're ready to, like, actually enable and adopt, that goes a long way. I like to call it like a curve of, you know, what's like relatively, like, what is it something that I can build that is easy and impactful, right?

And there's a kind of medium there that's my job to figure out. When I go and talk to, you know, leadership, CSMs, et cetera, that's at least a formula I use. So, okay, thank you. What lessons have you learned from all the deployments you've done?

So are there things like standard KPIs or business alignment? Yeah, so now that I've done this for so long, like, I would say, at my job now, we did, we used Gainsight to drive, and Gainsight has become our business. Like, it's very difficult to discern between the two, right? So, for example, even in, like, town halls, or, like, the quarterly town halls, the words that we use to talk about, you know, the performance and how the business is doing are directly correlated to what we have done in Gainsight, in the tooling that we have.

So, but getting there took us a while, right? Like, getting there took us years sometimes, and we had to iterate and scale over time. So, I would definitely say, like, how is it that you convert what you're building in the tooling into, like, an actual output that the business can appreciate and adopt that goes a long way? Nice, and I have one more question, it's a little bit loaded.

Okay, and this is something we all, I usually ask myself this once or twice a year. What's the one thing you built early on in your admin career that you would never do again, or do differently, but never do again? I have an easy answer to that. It's the same, every time I have a new job, it's the same conversation I always have.

It's like, Edgar, build me a scorecard. That works really well, and I'm like, at this point I'm like, no, we're not going to do that. I've done this way too many times, it doesn't work, right? Like, and again, it goes back to the maturity level of the company, and what is it that when people think about what that green, yellow, red means, like, it means so many different things to so many different people that, at least for me over the years, just becomes an exercise in futility to try to do over and over and over again.

So, like, I actually like to focus more on, like, okay, what are you actually trying to accomplish? What is the actual question you're trying to answer? Are you trying to gauge propensity to buy? Are you trying to gauge propensity to churn?

And maybe we focus on that and start there, and then eventually we do come up with a health score that works, but no, we are not doing a scorecard out of the bat. That's not going to happen. At least you don't have a blue in yours, red, yellow, green. That's right.

We have a blue. Lessons learned. Okay, so thank you, Edgar. We're going to move on to Amanda, because I'm going to shuffle up and confuse the panelists as much as I can.

So, Amanda, you've gone from being a hands-on admin to a principal PM at Adobe. How did that evolution change, and how do you think about what good looks like now? Good question. So, evolution, if I think back, gosh, I think it was 10 years ago that I got involved with Gainsight and being a Gainsight admin, having, you know, just being in the tool, being able to scale business the way that we needed to, being able to be that only person taking it from A to Z.

And I think if I look now, being a principal product manager, and then over the 10 years' experiences that I've had, it really has shifted to more of, and again, I think it depends on the company and the size of the company that you're working with. But for me, now that I'm at a bigger enterprise company, there's definitely some evolution there with, you know, having different business capabilities in, like, engineering. We have engineering. We have our business, and then I'm kind of, like, in the middle where you have your product manager.

So, there's, like, evolution from, you know, being that only sole person being able to do different things, and now you're having to go through different groups to get the work done. So, that makes it a little more difficult, but it also is, like, that evolution of, like, I think as you start out as a Gainsight admin, and if you continue on that path and become a product manager, that's kind of what it looks like. Thank you for that. That was interesting.

Where do you see teams maybe overcomplicating things? Oh, God. I'm not done yet. And what's the simplest thing you've done that actually moved the needle?

It's kind of double edge there. It's a double edge. So, the first one, overcomplication, I think there can be a lot of places in Gainsight where teams can overcomplicate, but I think what I realized from being, like, this principal product manager that kind of oversees everything is our engineering team and how they, and I think it's like complication with specifics around, like, creating new custom objects, and what are we putting in those objects and being able to connect those objects when you need reporting, or you have to use the data designer to get the reporting done because you've overcomplicated the back end with all these different objects. So, my words of why is to say don't do that.

Try to find another way. I know there's limitations around objects and how many fields you can have in an object, but I think that's where people tend to, or teams tend to overcomplicate as well as naming conventions. Right? Nice.

What was the second part? Sorry. No, the second part was what was the one thing that you just, the simplest thing that had the biggest impact that you've done? Oh, so just recently there was something that I went to engineering with and they were like, oh, we're not sure how to do that.

And I was like, okay, well, let me try to figure this out. Right? So I went and I was like, it was basically. Did you vibe code it?

What? Did you vibe code it? Yeah. Really?

No. No, it was actually something really easy and maybe some of you have done this, but we had an issue with our global filters where, you know, with the, we were trying to get success plan information onto the CSM homepage. Right. And we had a problem with the global filters.

It wouldn't allow us to filter properly. So I was like, okay, well, what I'm going to do to make this easy is I'm going to go in and I'm going to create all these different reports. Yeah, it was kind of a heavy, heavier lift, but I created the reports with the filters and then remove the global filters. So that was my workaround.

But that was like the simplest thing that I could think of to do. Sometimes simpler is better. It is. Was that the K ISS?

I'm not going to say it on microphone, but keep it simple. All right. Cool. We're going to round this up.

We're going to go to Craig for a second. Craig is going to focus on requirements, alignment and right sizing, I believe. And Craig, you've lived in both the project management world and the implementation world, at least from what you told me. And now you're leading a global organization of customer success managers.

The question I have is how do you derive the right requirements and get alignment, especially when the instance isn't enterprise scale, but there are multiple enterprise stakeholders? Yeah. As you mentioned, I've been able to live kind of on both sides. And I think as you go through that, you have the appreciation of working with the different admins, appreciating working with the engineers, but also knowing you've got on the business side really focused on the people that are, you know, wanting the results, the outcomes.

And I think that's the biggest probably advice that I've learned and have to remind myself to is, especially in a multi enterprise or multi department enterprise type of company is why are you doing what you're doing? And why are you asking for certain requirements or certain things to be built out? I think we often spend a lot of time when we get into the requirements and design phase of making it one to look a certain way or let's make it look cool. Let's make it look efficient.

Let's make everything flow together and you really start, you know, going back and forth. And I think when that arises, you start getting conflicts between some of the maybe the different business units or the team members or you don't get that alignment. And so I think the big piece advice is if you're able as an admin, maybe suggest this. If you're on the customer success side and the business side is start the conversations with what are the objectives of the organization.

You know, churn is always big, right? Or do we want to focus on growth and set that out? And we at the beginning of this year, we are beginning this year, we set a new set of objectives across all of our business units. So we aligned on, you know, what are we holding the CSM is accountable to?

What are kind of the key metrics that we want to achieve? And as we went through a redesign and redeployed gain site, we call that our gain site 3.0 launch, getting all four of our business units pulled together in a fifth kind of horizontal. As we built the requirements, everything was built based on what we were trying to achieve as an organization. And those goals were not customer success specific.

They were really how are we going to, you know, grow? How are we going to, you know, face the headwinds of the economic and the churn that we see? So as you go through requirements, what we found is we were able to kind of agree and align very quickly and keep it simple. You're kissing now is there in the requirements.

And at the end of the day, like we ended rolling it out and we're seeing the adoption go quickly and people are coming along. So rather than argue over the difference, you know, how does the design what should look like? I need this. My business unit special.

Really focusing on those objectives and letting everything align to that, I think will help across the kind of the enterprise conversation, sir. Nice. Now, this question might hit us in a good spot, especially with everything that's going on now. Can you name a time where you moved too fast and had to back that up?

No, I've never done that. Never? Never. The man doesn't speed either.

You just skydive. Actually, one probably the most recent one I can think through is we were rolling out qualified leads. And I think looking back, I would have reminded myself to think about the objectives. We were really challenged with our sales organization saying, where do you want those to land?

You know, is it a who should it go to? Where should it go? And we wanted just to push it. So we basically just rolled it out.

And it was kind of a free for all for all the CSM's to use. And there's kind of a good and bad of the story. The good was we're able to see what we were going to get in. What were the CSM's hearing?

What were they pulling back in so that we could leverage that in the future conversations? But I think the bad is we rolled it out and they really couldn't go anywhere other than just kind of manually sending to the sales teams. And we weren't able to really tie a whole lot of objectives to what I just talked about a second ago about how is this achieving growth? How is this achieving that?

We it's kind of like we had 500 last year. That was great. But we weren't able to kind of tie that back together. So I think that would be that one thing if we wanted to quickly roll it out.

But we probably should have taken them in to say how is this going to go all the way and achieve the objectives even if it's not going through the whole workflow of Salesforce and the sales team. Thank you. Maybe one more question for you. But I'm going to take a quick hands up poll because that's just how old school I am.

How many of us here build everything correct the first time? No. So how many of us try over and over again or think it's okay to fail? Excellent.

And we all still are employed. Little quick story. There's a CSM here that I used to work with a long time ago. And at one point I was asked to launch a journey orchestrators survey and apparently they wanted to do stage participants and you know A.B.

testing. And as the new admin I was like yeah we're going to go and do this and I'm going to show you what I can do. I had all of the participants and I scheduled it to run the next day. What I didn't realize is that they all go at the same time.

So I basically squashed all the A.B. testing and had to apologize profusely to the programs team. So that's my example of sort of failing. But like how have you have you handled failing quickly and how do you recover from that?

And how do you deal with the business saying hey this didn't work right the first time. What are you thinking? Yeah I think it's kind of the flipping the glass half full analogy and probably a simple answer and that but it's really pointing out what did we learn from this. And the sake of we were able to translate some of the numbers that we were on the CSQL example that we were to pull through there.

So I think it's being able not to say whoops let's try again but to here's what we learned. Here's what we're going to do again but probably more importantly here's what we're not going to do again and communicate that right. Own it be transparent about it. I think if you kind of sweep things under the rug you know whoops let's hope no one remembers that.

They do. Surprise right. But if you own it and really kind of take the small objectives or the small KPIs that were achieved call that out and then you know where it didn't. You know here's what we're doing next.

So I think transparency is the biggest thing. That's I've learned that probably over the bit of owning it up and sharing what you learned out loud. Yeah I've learned retrospectives can be good if the organization follows those type of practices but also I've used retrospectives as a needed sort of like speed bump. So when you're developing quickly you need to slow down sometimes and it's okay to say hey let's all sit back circle the wagon see what worked in or just like you said and make sure we don't make the same mistake twice because that's not fun.

So now we're going to go to sort of like a quick fire one question that you're all going to answer once. Yeah I didn't tell you about that. And then we're going to go handle the lovely amount of questions that you've all submitted. So if you have any questions for any of us or what good looks like in your instance or you want to share any information we're going to go to that in a second.

But for our quick fire round and we're going to start with Edgar first. So you've had plenty of time to rest. What's the one thing the room should go back and take a closer look at at their own gain site instance. Yeah I think that I promise is an answer to that question.

I think that it is mostly the I feel like there's a gap between sometimes there's a gap between what is being built and done in the gain site instance or any tool really versus like what the population that you're serving including leadership expects and just taking time to having like a potentially tough conversation about what's in there and what they're actually utilizing. And is it actually achieving the outcomes I think goes a long way. So just looking at yourself and being like hey is it is what we're doing or what we have done actually doing what like people actually using the things that we're building the way they expect them to. I feel like people don't have that conversation enough and that's what I would do.

Thank you Craig you're up next on the same question. Yeah I think the one thing I'd send people back with is go look at something that you've implemented say two years ago. That's working well one that is you know you're there it's been adopted by the users people are using it it's collecting data because I think the two year mark and what's working well as two years ago. I was nothing like it was today and if you go back and revisit that I think what you can find is it's working well you're collecting certain data points certain insights but now what more can you do with that right like data is king in the world of AI.

We talk about all the time you know decision ready data and if you can do more with that insight you've collected now I can you know if you're doing a lot now you will do even more with some of the models and some of the tools and how can you push that further. Whether that's to other stakeholders within the organization your go to market teams etc so two years ago you probably did to celebrate what you did but go back and revisit that especially if it worked well because I think what you can do now is a lot different than it was then. Thank you and certainly last but not least. I think we're okay.

I think for. I look back, I would say, probably look at some of the rules right that we've built I think a good example is we, you know, in my last company we had some rules that were running that really didn't need to run anymore there were rules that were that were running that weren't running. So I think things that were really apparent to us was that the hygiene of the system needs to be monitored obviously I think by someone either that be yourself as your single gain site admin or if you have an engineering team, making sure that they're, you know, on point for looking at those rules and doing some platform cleanup I know we today we have a lot of data that. You know, is not consistent or that needs to be coming into the system and sometimes that doesn't get in and so then we see see issues there so I would say definitely do some rule cleanup and hygiene.

Nice. I'll throw in a little bit there. I'm very big on new instances installations and implementations but when we look at like timeline activities, one of my big things is when you set up your organization, they all seem to just make sense for CS right customers at CSM site. I log a call I lock it in whatever interaction what I found it's good to go back and look at and reevaluate is the types of activities eventually you might bring on different business units into your gain site instance so it might make sense to customize timeline activity types just for them or CTA types as well.

So it's always good to go back and revisit and also is it how many admins do we have in here just like whoa okay so go back and review rules check your data your error logs business changes your data sources can change to and as we I promise you everyone knows here a field is missing and now you have extra work to do all that good stuff so one thing I would say just look at the business evaluate your timeline activities and how is the what is the best way to achieve the best reporting. And visibility. And so I think that's absolutely key I think anymore now. You're exactly right more people are looking to CSMs for intelligence decision making so I think you're exactly right going back and almost ask that questions and come back to the first question about requirements right is who else is going to use this right we get very selfish the CSM organization gets very selfish and saying I do you know the leaders of CSM want to do that but I think you're exactly right going through this.

Timelines and what else can we capture for other parts of the organization you know you're back that was a lot of the conversation how do you get people to see value in the CSM organization and I think just that now is go back and look at those timeline entries and find the dropdowns or the add ins or the extra fields that you can feed back to all the other pieces and I think that will answer that question. Thank you Edgar you have a microphone up I think you might. Yeah I'm thinking about this maybe. Well I'm thinking about this because I think you know like with the AI angle a lot of the things that we have built in in Gainsite now they used to be like you know nice processes right.

But now with AI they become systems of record that could be fed to different tools and so you know you need to ask yourself is the quality high enough to be a system of record and if it's not you should look at it tomorrow because it is going to get more visibility to your point and you wanted to be a system of record right because if it's not then you know people are going to have other conversations. People are going to have other conversations as to why are we doing this if it's not valuable or accurate enough. So yeah and again I just want to add again because I'm very passionate about data. Call me what you weigh and what you want whatever.

But basically now I just forgot I was going to say no reevaluate your data sources define your sources of truth that's going to shift over time and as you add more users and different types of business into your instance you need to say this is my source of truth for contacts. It's Salesforce it's a snowflake data set it's something like that but make sure the business knows it and also have your definitions. I work at GitLab we have a handbook we document the whatever out of everything and literally data dictionaries all over the place. This is the one way you can always say hey you have a question for your admin what does this mean what is the scorecard measure mean.

Look at over here we have a data dictionary and that's what it is and just make sure it stays up to date your thresholds change your business objectives change. Just got to keep aligning with it. The other thing I don't know if I said it before but maintenance also with the retrospectives give yourself some breathing room every six months you should have a one to two week period where you're in maintenance where you're clearing out data bad data retiring rules all the other good stuff. Be happy to talk about it more later but we have 20 questions waiting from all of you so please thank you please and thank you.

We're going to try and delegate these accordingly but I'll start from the top two which have the most votes first question from the audience is anonymous what one what's one unpopular admin decision you've had to make because it protected the long term health of the gain site instance. Are there any volunteers. Really. I can't give away what I did wrong again.

Yes we want. Right. I think maybe one again right now this is probably more of a decision I made with the admins but I think probably the one that's maybe more recent is the more the transparency and to my comments earlier we created there's the individual dashboards that were very transparent and showing you know where we're seeing good things happening high volumes. And I'm not a big advocate of saying hey the CSM should be you know the stats of how many meetings and all that right.

But I think as we were going through this new adoption phase it was important to show that transparency and push that out even though you know some people didn't like it right it was kind of unpopular to the whole team some of the managers or didn't want that the view of all of the usage and dashboard but I think what that's helped us and long term is is getting more consistency around the board and I think is the admins they're able to then come back and. Justify and honestly what it's done for us now is been able to help us justify where we need more headcount maybe where we need less where we need to shift so I think some of this just back to that transparency comment of adding pieces that show more of what's going on behind the scenes. You know what's what's the true data that's out there so that everybody can kind of level up and. Raise up to the where you see some of the higher performers or higher pieces there.

Thank you one thing I'll add because I like to talk a little bit. Here's something how many people have 20 dashboards in their instance. How many people have 30 dashboards in their instance how many people have over 100 dashboards in their instance. Okay this is what I like to preach when I have a new customer and you instance or anything where I'm going.

A CTA is a CTA is a CTA you build your dashboards for universal deployment. Building all these little fiefdoms of dashboards for business units is just gets unwieldy and then that maintenance that I just referred to earlier. You're gonna have more of it all of a sudden that team doesn't use that dashboard anymore or that they decided they're not going to use that thing to go somewhere else. It's really important to keep it focused and expand on a single like landing place so we like to build CSM dashboard or CSM manager dashboard.

We have inspection dashboards to look at things and find exceptions and like what helps me run my day to day. Try to make sure you have like theme focused or team focused dashboards and do not let them creep into the you know expand too far and over customize. That's one thing I would say and and yeah. Does anybody else have anything else to add?

Just two seconds on that one. That's true. I agree with everything you guys say. For us we have different business units like we are you know pretty large company with different BUs that sells you know multi platform multi country right so there's a lot of complexity and.

While we try to keep things similar there are inherent complexities that we cannot shy away from because this one team focuses on you know large enterprise global companies with country level data and again that just looks completely different than than the ones that aren't right so I think it's finding out. Keeping things like it's almost like you need to like I speak Spanish right and there's different types of Spanish right there's Peruvian Spanish Argentinian so on it's like everyone understands each other but you need to be able to select a flavor that works for everyone else so you can have cohesion but also something that I love about gain site is. Salesforce is that you can do you can customize things but that's kind of like the double edged sword of like how deep do you go into customizing things right because if you go too deep then you know you basically lose and you end up speaking you know Latin or something crazy. Interesting.

Portuguese. All right we're going to move because we have about 12 minutes and we got a bunch of questions to go and this is one of my favorite questions I ever get asked and we're all smiling and kind of chuckling a little bit but if you were starting from scratch and gain site what's the one thing you would absolutely not skip. Okay I haven't talked for a while yeah okay. That's what we're hearing.

Well this is kind of a two. It's too harder for me because from a admin perspective I would say you got it. You cannot skip automation. Like we are so you know I've been in my career for a while and it's kind of like if you don't do it automated first the manual is just going to it's going to kill you.

So definitely do not skip on the automation and then I would say also from a product management perspective making sure that you are on the same page as your business and making sure that you have those interviews with the business the understanding the pain points all of that that you need to have in place before you even start going down that path of hey what are we going to build and what are we going to solution for. Good answer. Yeah I think I'll pick up on where Amanda kind of landed as well. I think one thing that I have learned that I have to do every time I do this is I go to the person that hired me usually the SVP of CS and I asked them why did you hire me and what do you want this to be.

Like where are we going. I actually do this every year too with with my current company every year we sit down and I ask my boss. I'm like who do we want to be next year. Right.

Right. Where are we going. What things are changing. And that is a very powerful conversation to have.

And that also elevates you from tactical to strategic. But like I think that's something that I didn't do early on or as often and as directly. And that's something that you know as I start a new role I often do I go interview everyone and especially the person who essentially set a budget aside so they can hire me and start my team from scratch which is often what happens. And it's a gamble right at the end of the day doing this I would argue in today can be seen as a gamble.

So what is it that you're trying to accomplish. What are the pain points. What is the story you're trying to tell to your boss right that I can help you build with what we're doing with game time. Very good.

I actually echo that you need executive sponsorship you need support for your platform or else it will sort of fall by the wayside. So if you do not have that buy in you do not have that agreement in alignment. It's going to be challenging when you try to deploy a new process. You've got to have the right enablement and the one thing I've learned is to start small and maybe slow.

And I know that's not a good word to use these days with everything but I like to use the crawl and this has been I've said this before I'm repeating myself was the crawl smash your head on the coffee table get some scars and stitches get back up again do some crawling exploring and then you start to walk going slow when implementing new processes is very important. I feel it helps get the buy in the value proposition that Edgar was talking about. What's the value. Why am I here.

What am I doing in gain site. If we if you get that defined up front you'll have more success in the future and then you'll have more CSM's that are likely to be your SMEs or as I call them Jedi's. Okay we're going to move on to the next one and I always this is a kind of a fun question. What's the ideal number of gain site admins to CSM ratio in our experience and would anyone like to start off or I'll just tell you.

No what I've seen when you get to the depends on how complex your organization is it depends on how deep it is. I look at it as fully licensed users versus non fully licensed users you're really admitting towards the full licenses. I feel in the seventy five to hundred user range that's your single CSM environment as soon as you start to go higher than that you're going to have more business units more volume more requests more overhead. Then I feel you start to get into the you have a senior admin junior admin and you start to work that up.

I like to intrinsically work with a very energetic CSM that is interested in gain site that guy over there that might be awake. Anyway so do you guys have any other thoughts around those thresholds. I'll take a stab at it. I don't hire gains at admins.

I hire people that I call them CSO's leads or not. And I what I like to hire is people who are no gains site very well understand the tooling but they can also turn around and talk to a VP. I have a conversation with them so they can understand what I was just talking about where the value is right and then they can turn around to and talk to a data person and understand you know how do we get the problem solved and then that they can also enable the organization. Or help enable the organization.

I try to hire for that full circle and it's not easy. Not everyone has those skills and sometimes we have to build them and we do. But I feel like being able to do all of that having the technical background having the ability to talk on executive having the ability to talk to a tech person all of that really makes for at least for me just makes things so much easier. Because you don't have to be going between silos talking to someone else I would enable them and then again at my current job we've built this whole enablement motion where we take currency SM's and leaders to help us then you know I call it the meat grinder to help us whatever it is that we're solving for go through the meat grinder and then we actually have the actual words that we need to utilize to then deploy to the entire organization right and sometimes we use them to do it.

Because they speak the same language you know between CSM's or between leaders and then we do so that's that's what I like to do. Excellent. We are going to try to move a little faster. I am because we have a lot of questions still so we want the next one.

How do you just moved. How do you get CSM's to actually use all the cool stuff. Thank you for not putting that in air quotes that you built in gain site and not just not along in training. I can give a quick easy answer on this one.

Two things make their job easier and make them look good. I think that's the biggest thing is if you're rolling things out don't focus on here's how you click buttons. Here's how it used to work. Here's how it works now.

Focus on making their job easier so they can punch out and go home at the end of the day. Age myself on that one and then to make them look better right make them look successful. That's that's you'll get the adoption that way much easier than focusing on the clicks. Definitely agree with that one also and I think Edgar says this leadership plan you have to have executive sponsorship you have to have leadership buy in.

It has to come top down if it doesn't. That's where you're going to run into some trouble and there's not a that's not a bad thing like you sometimes you can be perceived as such but like if you're going to build a process and the leader not going to use it then the CSM's have no incentive to use them right. I mean it's just the way it works and then just quickly on what correct said we do something very similar and we call it what's in it for me. So what's in it for the CSM?

Why are you doing? Why are we doing this to them right? So just two central. Alright let's move on.

What's the one? Oh it's gonna be fun. What's the one thing you've implemented in gain site that you're truly proud of that's made a real impact. I'll say quickly I built this contact management thing.

I don't want to call it but like it's a process to basically build out a switchboard of your contacts to basically curate based off of your business rules of real solid independent data set of contacts for your journey orchestrator. So when I first joined GitLab they came to me and said I've got to create three sources for every single J.O. that I want to send out in order to get all this data together so I can define who these types of personas are and I said that sounds like a good challenge and we built a custom object and so on and so forth and if anyone wants to hear about it I'll be happy to chat further and then I'll pass it along to see what else is too cool. It's not that cool.

What about you? I would say so at the very beginning of my career with gain site we were very involved with helping them out with and I can't remember what the call success plan. They're like a success plan. You can put them in PowerPoint things like that snapshots.

So the reason I brought it up is because you know not all things are great right. So it's what good looks like right. But you also have to know the bad too. So we worked with gain site on success snapshots.

That's what it's called. And through you know working with gain site and trying to get it to work the way we wanted we could actually never get it to work the way we wanted. However we were able enough to get it to where we needed to send or make it easy for the CSM to put that information in there. So there was that but I think ultimately you know full transparency.

We didn't use it that much but it was it was a I felt like it was a success for me because it was something I hadn't done before and I was like oh this is kind of cool. We have a clock here Craig you have 16 seconds to give us your best thing. I probably might it goes back to the center of a feature but just getting everybody aligned unless maybe jumps to one of the next questions kind of the time to value to but we've had gain site for four years plus I think more maybe more than that. But you know we finally were able to kind of align all the business units together and I know that isn't a single item that we implemented but getting that alignment across the board seems to be probably one of the biggest values that I think we've got through and made an impact because everybody's using it.

And we're building up so. Two quick things when I was at a previous job and this is like a memory I just unlocked because I had forgotten we built finding was IBM cloud and IBM cloud. It was a consumption model it was a I and so we built an entire consumption token burn basically CS motion which is now very popular as you all may know and I didn't remember that we had done that so that's one and then quickly. We have done a lot of work to try to align our entire organization amongst 10 key indicators and it has been not just a technical challenge but also a cultural one and what it has done is helped us speak about our value as a CS organization right given everyone exactly the same words and share the same story so we can you know evangelize what we do.

Nice with the whole 45 seconds left and 22 questions waiting. We're not going to belabor any of that time to value in gain site that's a tough one to crunch in 30 seconds. That all depends on the organization how well it's adopted and how. Edgar has one.

Oh, oh yeah. Edgar specific. Can you post a blog or something we can take to our leadership team on why we should not build another scorecard. Yeah.

Once I'm going to skip. I'll add you to that one a realistic time frame. Maybe if you want to meet us in the hallway we can chat some more about that. Let's see one sign an admin team is moved from being seen as ticket takers to strategic operators.

That's what you start shaping and advising on how you own gain site you know gain site you know its capabilities and you are driving them to use it better. You show your expertise you will like a sword because I like to be in the Middle Ages and yeah that's that's pretty much that and we're over time guys. But we have so much more to talk about. I know.

Well what we did last year is something we will take these questions and we'll try to answer them on community or if anyone wants to have a hallway chat or whatever else will be around. But we really appreciate you guys taking time. A little round of applause for our panelists.