Hello Gainsight CE (formerly Northpass) family! We’re gearing up to have an incredible Pulse this year in St. Louis (new location!) and we want YOU to share your story and take the stage! Take this opportunity to share your Customer Education Success Story with the wider Customer Success world.

This year’s Pulse is really focused on Customer Impacting SaaS - this includes Customers Success, Product, Community, and Customer Education! 

 HERE is our speaker nomination form

We often get a lot of questions around “How can I set myself up for success to get selected to speak at Pulse?”  Well, keep on reading to learn more. 

I'm going to list out some advice to help set you up to increase your chances of being selected - it doesn't need to hit all of these points, but the more the better!

Formatting your talk:

Problem, Solution, and Outcome 🫡

Some of the most engaging talks stick to a linear path of illustrating what the problem was that your team needed to solve for, what the solution was (be specific!) and finally, what was the numerical outcome of the solution.

Keep in mind the power of storytelling with data!  Avoid using vague statements like “We saw a HUGE increase in X” but rather “We decreased X by Y% which resulted in $Z/ #Z, etc...

1. Problem/Challenge - What did this situation look like before you brought on Northpass / Gainsight Education? Having measurable baseline data will drive home the importance of the solution you implemented and the resulting outcome.
   • Example: Our CSMs were spending an average 10 hours per week on customer onboarding calls and trainings. This was not allowing them to space to be more proactive with their book of business. 
2. Solution - How did you use Gainsight CE (and, if applicable, other Gainsight products) to intervene and change the tides?
   • Example: By creating an onboarding Learning Path with supplementary self-service content for our onboarding customers.
3. Outcome - what was the business impact as a result?
   • Example - As a result, the average hours per week our CSMs were spending on training calls with customers went down by 50%! In addition, our onboarding NPS score grew by 20%. CSMs reported that their clients are more engaged and asking more strategic questions on calls.

Common Themes (& Other Tips) 🤫

Digital / Self-Serve (Do More with Less) - this is a topic that quite literally everyone is talking about these days.  Can your story include how your team has learned to scale your education program by adopting a self-serve academy for your clients? Then all the better; this will be incredibly valuable for all attendees!

Scale & Efficiency - Think about how to measure your outcome (hours saved, support ticket reduction, scaling onboarding processes, etc..)

The Customer Journey - Every company has a customer journey. How has the adoption of an academy improved your customer’s journey? What changes did you make? Did you have to take a risk that paid off big? Everyone is looking for suggestions on how to make their own customer journey more exciting - share yours! 

Gainsight’s 4 Value Drivers - another powerful theme to tie this back are around the 4 Value Drivers of Gainsight that are on all of our customers' minds these days

1. Increased Retention - did this increase GRR/NDR/NLR? 
2. Increased Expansion - did this increase cross-sell/upsell opportunities? PQLs? CSQLs?
3. Increased Scale & Efficiency - examples above! I would also include things like Decreased Cost to Serve, Decreased spend in R&D, etc….
4. Improved Adoption & Customer Sentiment - did you increase golden feature adoption? NPS, CES, CSAT, etc? 

Let’s journey through an example together using one of the themes above.

Theme: Digital/ Self Serve Onboarding

• Problem: Our CSMs/Onboarding Teams were spending an average of 10 hours per week onboarding new customers with redundant topics and basic How-To’s within our product.  This takes away valuable time for them to focus on high pay-off activities.

TIP TIME!

• Example: 20 CSMS spending 10 hours per week with average salary of $100,000 (for easy math )
  1. Let's calculate it:
     • Weekly Cost per CSM = ($100,000 / 52) * 10 = $1,923.08
     • Total Weekly Cost = $1,923.08 * 20 = $38,461.54 per week
     • Annual Cost = $38,461.54 * 52 = $2,000,000 (approximately)
• Solution: We implemented Gainsight CE / Northpass platform by taking our most common onboarding questions and topics and revamping them into engaging courses that client’s can access from anywhere. We also required that our foundational course was completed before the implementation kick-off call. 
• Outcome: Reduced CSM time spent by X hours ($Y saved) or Decreased Support tickets by X% , etc…

BONUS! Tie in multiple Gainsight products! If you can show off how you're using all of the Gainsight products in your tech stack - this can also be a really compelling story! CS, PX, CC, CE!

Tie in High Level and Tactical 🌮

I said Tactical, not Taco! 

Think in terms of "here's what we did, and here's how we did it". Customers often share that they love presentations at Pulse that give them some actionable takeaways. 

What steps did you take, which departments were key stakeholders, any initial challenges you encountered and how you overcame them, and important learnings. Any tips for CE and other tools you can share will be powerful!

Sometimes, this can even be things outside of Gainsight itself that you do internally (how you overcome working with asking for resources from Engineering, how you worked Cross Functionally with Marketing/Ops/Product to come up with internal processes that streamlined your use and effectiveness of using Gainsight, other tools in your tech stack you use, processes/methodology you created to help streamline...). Bring your ideas! This is exactly the place to share them.

And Finally….

We’re here to help!  Please be sure to work with your CSM (or comment below!) to ask for any feedback or suggestions.  We’re excited to see your name on the submission list! See you at Pulse 2024!