Cockpit Views!

Cockpit can often feel overwhelming to me as a CSM. When everything gets mashed up across all my customers in the “My CTAs” or “Open CTAs” view my head is often left spinning and I will kick out cleaning up my cockpit to a future date.  But then I end up missing key signals from automated CTAs or I find my customers who aren’t vying for my attention end up falling through the cracks and being forgotten.

Luckily, I can create my own Cockpit Views to help manage my CTAs in more bite-sized chunks that make sense to me. Some of my favorites are:

• separating out Automated CTAs vs Manually created (Proactive) CTAs that I usually create to manage projects / larger customer To:Dos that I need top of mind.
• Timeline Tasks view which gathers all of the tasks I create in my Timeline Entries into a single place to knock-out my post-call follow up items.
• Starred CTAs to keep my most important projects and To:Dos top of mind. 

I made a Miro Board with all of my favorite views and the end user Config Settings on how to set them up.  Cockpit Customized Miroboard

Success Plans as my Cadence Call Agenda

As a High-Touch CSM, I meet with most of my customer’s bi-weekly and juggling that many calls and agendas can in and of itself feel overwhelming.  Success Plans to the rescue!  I use the CTA screen within Success Plans to track the projects and focus areas of each of my customers along with my the items I am keeping on the radar for them. What I like most about this flow is that my customers’ Success Plan acts as a living document, rather than filling it out once and letting it sit for 9 months untouched.

Here is a real example of one of my customer success plans that I have anonymized:  

A few key call outs:

• Tasks & Follow-Ups CTA:   This is an ‘evergreen’ CTA that I add tasks to that come up on our calls. They are often follow up items, information that I need to gather and provide to the customer, feature requests that I am tracking for them, or calls I am setting up with experts from within our company or with another customer.  Once I complete the task, I delete it (hoping that one day we get task views so I can keep completed tasks without them being visible)
  • I star this CTA so that it shows up in my Starred CTAs Cockpit View and I can manage all my call follow-up items and make sure I am on top of things for each of my customers.
• Use of Priority and Due Date:  These are my customer’s projects and often times, their timeline will slip.  A key workflow on my cadence calls is having them go through this list and have them set their estimated Due Dates and tell me the Priority they have for each of them.  This helps my customers have a space to reflect on what is most important for them while also being able to keep projects in the Low priority and push it out a quarter or two on the Due Date, working as a sort of Backlog.
  • Knowing what is High Priority to them helps me know where I can lean in on sharing strategy, best practices, pulling in resources.
• Status:  New = Backlog, Work in Progress is… well… in progress, and Scheduled is something that is completed by them but that we have yet to Quantify value on.  Again, this helps guide me in how to best support them and also makes sure that we are talking about Verified Outcomes regularly. It trains my customers to start thinking about value metrics earlier on when I hold them accountable to quantifying that value for their projects.

This is a basic tip, but something that really helps me is bolding my to-do’s while taking notes in Timeline during customer meetings. The next steps then stand out when I’m reviewing them afterwards which makes it easier to make sure I don’t miss anything!

Streamlines and clean Gainsight Home is huge for me! Less clicking around and multiple reports in one spot that are most useful to my day to day