CTA for Activities not related to an Account

I understand that it is awkward to use a stand-in account for this use case.  Fact is, the assumption of an Account is really central to the current object model that moving away from it would be quite challenging.  I am curious: besides the poor aesthetics of having a default account sitting there, are there functional limitations that you find in the current setup?

Is it possible to assign a CTA to all of the CSM's (or all in a certain category) using the dummy/default account? This was previously raised in this post; and it didn't seem like that could be done.

We can only assign a single resource to an account...so the CTA would get assigned to an individual CSM using the dummy account method.

You are right, Jeff, that it is not possible to have duplicate CTAs on the same account.  However, there is a way to make this work by tokenizing the CTA name. In this way, each CTA is different and so you can have one for each CSM.  

Here is one approach. 
1. Add a lookup from Customer Info to your default account
2. Build the rule on Customer Info bringing in (at least) CSM, CSM Name and the Default Account reference from above
3. Add any filters that you want -- e.g. if you only want to assign the CTA to CSMs who manage large customers you can add a filter on ARR.  Or whatever.
4. In the Account Lookup selector (at the bottom of the Setup Rule screen) select the Default Account reference.  This is where the CTA will show up. 
5. In the Action screen, you (of course) select Call to Action.  
6. Now here is the key point: in the Name field type the generic name and the that AT symbol, @.  Then select CSM Name or CSM Email (or something else unique per CSM).  This field value will then be appended to the CTA name, thus making the uniqueness criteria per CSM.  

 

7. Be sure to assign the CTA to the CSM from your Show fields.

To review what is going on here: we selected all customers (with an optional filter) and extracted the CSM information.  We also told the system to take the action on the Default Account based on the lookup field that we added.  Naively, this should create one CTA on the default account for every Customer -- but that doesn't happen because the system says 'ah, ha! you are creating duplicates (same name and reason) here so I will throw them all out but one.'   But by adding in the CSM name (or other unique thing about the CSM) into the Name, then the system will create one CTA for each CSM.  What is cool here is that even though a given CSM will manage many customers, you will still get just one CTA for each CSM. 

 

The ability to create CTAs that are not associated to customer accounts would be really beneficial to our team as well.  I can understand that adding the ability to leave the account blank could really be a challenge with your current model.  Another thought I had would be for Gainsight to instead have a built in 'default account' for every user. The default account could function similarly to customer accounts but have some sort of 'internal only' flag that does not include it in certain reports or analytics.  Every CSM would then have an account called "Melissa Personal" or something they could assign CTAs and tasks to.  Obviously, still not an easy or quick fix, but something to think about!

Interesting approach.  Thanks for the input Melissa!

I also agree with Melissa's comment! I personally would like to use Gainsight as a one source of truth for anything I need to do Account Management related. Having the option to not assign a CTA to a specific account will allow me to do things like "Update Health Status in SalesForce" as a generic reoccurring task. While I understand you can build dashboards to help with this and build CTAs with rules to look for things like Update Health Status, there are instances where this is not the case and having the option to add a basic CTA would be nice.

Agreed!

I agree with this approach as well.  Wonderful idea and definitely needed!

I consistently create 'Action Item' lists for my team.  Currently I do this via email, but it would be nice to have the ability to utilize the CTA feature for this to help increase usage of Gainsight and trackability.