What Nobody Tells You About Your Gainsight Journey

Welcome everyone. My name is Rishi Bagwundin. I do lead up the tech services at Groat Molecules. Thank you to Natasha for queuing us up.

So the name of our session is "What No One Tells You About Your Gainsite Journey". And we hope to uncover some really cool insights by talking to my three friends here. They're at different stages in this journey. So we'll try to learn some key insights from them.

Alright, so starting, let's go ahead and get oriented with the group. Sean, Samio and Josh, if you can just introduce yourself and tell us where you are in the journey. Sure. Sean Sprigg.

I work for Emerson. I lead our life sciences customer success program. And we're in the evaluation phase at this point in time. Samio Mukherjee, VP of business systems at Brace.

So we are right beyond where you are, Sean. So we basically implemented Gainsite, I want to say three months back. And right now, if you relate what Chuck was talking about, buy and build, build and buy. So we are in the build phase right now.

We bought, we implemented, we are building on top of our platform right now. My name is Josh Levessey. I'm the director of customer success at Rhythm. And we are in the post launch phase.

So we launched Gainsite in March. And now we are still in the build phase, but we are in the post launch. Awesome. Thank you.

So you probably got a sense. We have thinking about it, just implemented it. And, you know, a little bit mature in their usage. So Sean, let's start off with you.

You're still in the evaluation phase. What made you finally decide that it was time to take a serious look at Gainsite? And what surprised you the most in the process? So I think what surprised me most about this process is that it's not about the technology that's making us really want to take a look at the next step.

We are already sold on the technology. I think that we're excited to have a platform that can scale our customer success organization like Gainsite and provide that sort of capability where we've had some interesting observations, if you will, through this evaluation phase is establishing a strong foundation in our customer success discipline. Customer success is a value at Emerson. We call it customer focus.

And so it's ingrained in all of our functions from the front office, the back office, but only until recently, say within the last few years, when we've made more of an effort into subscription software, we've recognized the need for customer success as a discipline. And so that's where we bring in partners like growth molecules and invest a lot of time and energy to develop our roles and responsibilities, the journey maps, all the collateral, and really try to build that program within our company. I think that's some of the challenge. I think driving alignment within our business is also some of the challenge when you're talking about a big multinational corporation with lots of different products and services.

But we're really looking forward to getting to that maturity level in terms of our customer success execution that we provide a strong foundation for that platform like Gainsite to be a force multiplier. We're really looking forward to that. Thank you, Sean. And for those of you who know Emerson, it's an extremely large organization, global, multiple countries.

What's the employee count? Do you know Orphan? You're putting me on the spot. Sorry.

Okay, great. So what Sean shared so far, I'm pretty sure it's relatable if you're in that phase of the journey, right? The friction and making sure there's alignment across the org and discipline. I think I've heard you say discipline a handful of times.

So that's right as well. All right, Samio, for you, you recently went through the full implementation. We were grateful to partner with you on that. So thank you.

Thank you. What do you think it was going to look like versus what did it actually look like? And what would you tell Sean right now as he's thinking about this? Sean, I want to start with the second question first.

Sean, you're thinking about all the right things, I would say. But one thing that caught me by surprise, I have implemented software all my life. But one thing that caught me by a little bit of a surprise is that I thought like any other software implementation, you do requirements, you do design, you implement, you do UAT, you purchase a SAS application, you do configuration, you plug in the integrations, you enable and boom, you're done. One key thing that was missing from what I did not plan enough for was the data architecture work.

And when it's a data architecture work, it is in Gainsite when you are presenting a certain set of information to your users, essentially your CSMs, your CS leadership, what data, what are the sources of the data, how they're trusted. And last but not the least, how is the user experience going to look like? So putting those things together in a collaborative way with our CS business, with our CS ops, with you guys growth molecules, and with our data team, and we business systems in the middle of it all. I think that came a little bit of a surprise which we had not planned as much for.

So my advice to you will be on top of everything that you're thinking in the right way, budget and plan for sufficient amount of time in terms of discussing and coming up with a good data architecture strategy cross-functioning. Awesome, thank you. I remember working with you guys and doing that whole data architecture layout. I think we took a first iteration of it, we came back to the drawing board, and what we finally landed on was something that is serving the business well.

Awesome. All right, so Josh, this one is to you. You already had Gainsite up and running. When you brought us in, what made you realize you weren't getting the full value out of Gainsite?

And what actually changed after the optimization? Sure, so about a year ago, we made changes in the leadership of our CS organization. And one of the first things we wanted to do is assess all the tools that the team was using. So Gainsite was being number one, you know, and interviewing our CSMs, they were really looking at it as a system of record instead of a system of action.

It was something they should do instead of running the business through the, running it through Gainsite. So we took a step back, we understand how valuable Gainsite is for us to accomplish our goals, but we know we needed to approach it in a different manner. So we went through a full re-implementation, we brought on a Gainsite administrator, we reached out to growth molecules, we didn't want to repeat the issues that we did before. So the data architecture, that's where Rishi was so valuable to us in establishing that foundation, establishing credible health scores.

I mean, we were able to build that dashboards and reporting that help our CSMs on a daily basis at this point. So for us, the CSMs really had lost faith. But now when we just roll this back out with Gainsite, they can see the structure there, get office hours are packed, adoption is fully taken on by the entire team. If anything, our Gainsite wishlist grows every day because our team is seeing the value and the capacity unlocked that Gainsite is providing.

And we can get back to servicing our clients instead of doing some of these administrative tasks. Thank you. I think Josh, if I remember right, one of the things we were concerned about at the front end was adoption, right? Like making sure folks actually log in, they actually do the activities, utilize the things that were built out.

And that's extremely on the great side of that curve now. So good stuff. All right, so this one's to all three of you. If you had to name one thing that separates a successful Gainsite journey from a frustrating one, what would it be?

Well, we're still on that journey. We are still in evaluation phase. But I think what we can anticipate is that we need to have strong fundamentals in how we execute customer success. That's going to be crucial for us as opposed to leveraging the tool to do it for us.

And the way I might explain that in simple terms is I want to teach my kids how to multiply before giving them a calculator so that they know how to use that calculator and when it's giving them the wrong answer. So I think for us, a crucial aspect is having that foundation of customer success as discipline. I said discipline again. That way we can be effective when we use the tool.

Yeah, I can talk for hours on this, but you asked me to state only one reason. So I would say stakeholders, sponsorship, stakeholder alignment. And when I say that, it's not only top down from the execs down, but also bottom up from your end users. So build confidence in your end users.

They should trust the tool. They should trust the data. They should trust the team. And your execs, customer success execs, should have enough conviction in the team that, hey, they can do the job.

Gainsite is the right tool. So you have to build the story and make sure your execs are with you in the store. There was a phrase that somebody mentioned in one of the other projects is that don't do a change to me. Do the change with me.

Instead of doing the change to the users, make sure we do the change with the users. Take them along in the journey. I think that's not just Gainsite, any enterprise implementation, that's the key. And for me, I'll echo both of you.

I think it's early trust establishing that early trust with our CSM team. I knew there would be resistance in going back into Gainsite from some of the issues that they had previously. So this time we went with a much more organic approach. We rolled it out.

We enabled our team. We created office hours and a lot of space for them to learn on their own. And then we saw that adoption grow organically. This wasn't something that you have to use, but over the first month, we saw that go all the way up again to 100% adoption to where they believe in the product.

And again, now they're coming to us and I see Gainsite can do this. How can we implement it? And they're bringing that to myself and then our Gainsite admin as well. Awesome.

Thank you. So we're doing good on time. So feel free to spread a little bit more on this. What would be a piece of advice you would give to someone in the audience who's sitting on the fence on your next step with Gainsite?

Great. Good question. I think for me, it's having a good sponsor and starting. I've been really fortunate to have some leadership that has recognized the value of customer success and is willing to make some of those investments in our team and personnel in developing the program.

But I think that it's taking that action, starting. I think that's the first step in piece of advice. Start, establish your foundation, establish your program and scale from there. Totally agree.

And I often feel like in such kind of situations, we are all valid up right behind the start line, waiting for the gunshot to fire. Nobody's firing the gunshot. So that's the situation. And I did make a point about data, data architecture.

So I would make a counterpoint to that right now. Because if you're on the fence and thinking, oh, my data is not there yet. We are not in the perfect state of data quality. So don't wait for the perfection to happen in terms of your data.

It will never happen. Take it from me. So instead of waiting for that, making perfection the enemy of good, you have to be intentional about what data in what format, in what user experience fashion that you want to surface it up to your users and take the leap of faith. The data will evolve, data will get better with the company, with the processes, but don't wait to get started.

If you wait too long, you probably won't start. Yeah, Josh. Yeah, I would say the same thing with the executive alignment and then your own your own Gainsight customer journey. Setting yourself up for goals.

Gainsight has so many offers and features that it's very easy to say I need to pivot to this and I need to pivot to that. But making sure you have your North Star that you're working to, and the resources available to do that. The first time we implemented Gainsight, we didn't have the resources internally. So we took that as an example to go back to our leadership to say these things take time, effort, and ongoing support.

Awesome. So in the audience, if you're at a certain stage in your Gainsight journey, maybe you're thinking about purchasing it or you're evaluating, like Sean here, or if you're like Samuel and you've just implemented and you're trying to figure out what's next and what success looks like, that's great as well. And then like Josh said, they've been using it for a few years. They decided that, hey, we should be getting a little bit more value out of this.

Let's go ahead and optimize it. And that's what they ended up doing. So thank you all for being here, joining me on stage. For the audience, if you have any questions, more for the panelists.

We'll be sitting at a table right past the the food section there. Feel free to pop by, say hi, you know, make a contact. Maybe you set up a meeting later on, ask some more questions, and see what a journey takes you. Thank you.

Thank you.