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Hello!





My organization is mid-rollout for Gainsight and I am starting to plan forward for its ongoing operations. I am wondering if it makes sense to hire a full-time Gainsight admin. Those I've spoken to so far have indicated that it is common to have one admin fulfill both roles, especially for smaller organizations. In our case we would initially have an experienced SFDC admin picking up Gainsight.





Does anyone have an opinion on what the workload is for ongoing operations? Or alternatively, at what number of users is it worth having the role separated out? Some variables to consider are:





- Number of Gainsight users


- Number of Salesforce users


- Multiple geographic locations


- Multiple functions


- Eventually using automation in Gainsight, but limited automation initially





I found this post regarding combining it w/ an SFDC role, but it did not address company size or user base:





https://community.gainsight.com/gainsight/topics/is-it-feasible-to-be-both-a-salesforce-admin-and-ga...





Would appreciate any thoughts or advice!





Josh
Hi Josh, I'm actually a full time Gainsight Admin for my Company.  While our Gainsight application is only used within a section of the Company - I manage it for roughly 85+ Users who make up 8 distinctive departments of varying sizes, within the section I work in.  Most of the users are remote users.  I myself work on Campus, but for projects am able to work from home if necessary.





Due to our size, we wouldn't want all of our users creating their own content - as it would get a little out of hand rather quickly.  So a dedicated resource to build, maintain, and grow the software I would say is worth it.  Our users are solely in Gainsight - but I also maintain our Salesforce information as well, which of course feeds into Gainsight.





Sagan
Hi Josh, can you share the number of Gainsight users that would be relying on this Admin role? What's the team size and how many Gainsight applications are you planning on using?
Thank you so much for the response, Sagan!





Quick question, are you the sole Salesforce admin as well, or is it only you splitting your time between the tools? How many Salesforce users do you have?
So without getting into to much detail - for the department I admin for, I spend majority of my time developing Gainsight.  And a small amount of my time inside of Salesforce developing it - but when I am in Salesforce, I'm creating content to be pushed to Gainsight. 





The users I work with are majority Gainsight Users.  We've been able to move a lot of our stuff from our previous CRM into Gainsight - actually a few areas have been moved into a central area within Gainsight.
Dan,





For sure. We expect to have over 50 users of Gainsight for the near future.





Just to make sure I am using terminology correctly, when you say applications do you mean functionality with Gainsight itself or Gainsight apps/integrations?





Josh
Thanks again! This is very helpful feedback.
Thanks Josh. Yes, I'm referring to Gainsight functionality like Journey Orchestrator, Surveys, Scorecards, Relationships, etc.
Ok, just wanted to be sure!





Out of the gate we will be using:


- The basic dashboards


- Cockpit (users will leverage this and we also want to do reporting on usage)


- Timeline (users will leverage this and we also want to do reporting on usage)


- Scorecards


- Email templates (a small number of them)


- Playbooks (a small number of them)





We would like to quickly get to the following after roll-out:


- More customized Dashboards


- Scheduled NPS surveys


- Many playbooks


- More email templates


- Risk-triggered CTAs


- Opportunity-triggered CTAs


- Integrations with our ticketing system
Based on the size of your rollout and the features you're looking to build both immediate and longer term, I'd recommend someone as a dedicated Gainsight resource. Ideally this person would be a "Customer Success Operations" role similar to how sales has their "Sales Operations" role. This person would help to not only build the configurations but work with management to define processes, refine workflows and plan strategy for the CS function. 

I know this is an older post, but it’s something I often wonder as well. There are some good points made here. I’m inclined to think that the extent to which you use the product and all of its potential features would be the most important factor, regardless of # of users. E.g. once you have  several integrations, rules,  JO programs, data ingestion jobs, etc. in place, it becomes more time consuming to troubleshoot and add additional customizations.

 

That said, I think the reverse is also true. When you have a large # of users and several departments use GS, then even if you’re only using a handful of features, you will still spend a lot of time maintaining the data integrity and streamlining cross-functional processes.

 

It’d be interesting to know the thresholds for each scenario.I think it’d be great to get a survey out there that would collect this type of information across numerous companies/industries (assuming one does not already exist).

I agree. I think there are a couple key factors that will force a company to have a full-time admin: number of users, number of cross-functional teams using Gainsight, etc). These factors for me tend to be about what will it take to keep Gainsight running smoothly. In my mind, this is a very reactionary position on wether you should have an admin. 

What I have found most successful for companies who are using Gainsight is to think much more proactively about what you want to build in Gainsight. Typically the first implementation of Gainsight just get’s the party started. The more you can think about what processes you want to automate and how you can improve customer adoption/expansions/renewals, you will get way more out of Gainsight. 

If you’re a company of 50 users and are thinking, I probably just need 50% of an admin to address bugs and make some improvements to the tool from time to time, I would suggest you’re looking at it wrong. Instead, I would think about do I have budget for 1-2 admins, and if I had time, what kind of pipeline of changes could we put together that would drive significant impact in my business. I find most companies are not thinking big enough about future possibilities versus just keeping the lights on. 

Hi All, 

I am seeing the need for additional admins in our organization. We are currently about 1.25 FTE’s dedicated to Gainsight. One of our biggest challenges is having multiple hats therefore taking a significant amount of time away from our daily roles (less focus on Gainsight). 

I would also look at what the future development pipeline is as well as the complexity of your data - we underestimated the complexity of our data and what’s necessary to accomplish our goals. This has required additional rules to be built, more testing, etc. 

Finally, from an operational perspective, we hit the tipping point at around 75 users - this has caused an increase of support tickets for our end users. 

Also note, that we are getting a lot of departments asking to use Gainsight! We have 9 or 10 different groups looking to utilize Gainsight and 5 actively in Gainsight.

Hope this sheds light on our experience and can provide ideas for your resourcing needs! 

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