Group Send - Allow this to work with User Groups

It’s NOT usable for user groups? ​@kstim ​@kim_stone for awareness.

This feels like something that would have come up far earlier “if we only had a beta” to keep with the Wicked theme. With our push to scale, this is absolutely needed. I’d love to see Gainsight take the place of Outreach for our CSx teams. ​@darkknight, this is an awesome idea:

​@Kenneth R, can we get some eyes on this? Not sure who the product owner is.

​@darkknight  ​@dayn.johnson 

While Group Send is currently launched for the named CSM model, we're would look to gradually extend it to support the scaled CS model as well in future.

In the meantime, we’d love to hear your feedback & the named CSMs on your team who can now use this feature to send bulk emails.

Your input will help shape the next phase of improvements!

​@ssamarth I was disappointed to discover that ONLY a CSM can use this.  We have TAMs mapped to accounts, and are soon going to have additional assigned resources.  It seems hardly fair to turn this on for CSMs only and leave our TAM team out.  

Do you have any target estimates on when this will be expanded beyond just users mapped to the CSM field?

​@darkknight 

Since this is the first time we’re enabling bulk emailing for end-user personas, we're intentionally taking a gradual approach. This gives us the flexibility to course-correct if needed before rolling it out to more personas.

We’d love to get this in the hands of your named CSMs and hear their feedback—it’ll be really valuable in shaping how we move forward!

As I noted in ​@benwanless’s post re: tokenization of user groups for CTA assignment:

We’ve got a scaled distro list for sending to those pooled/digital accounts, and will be creating a Salesforce persona so the CSM fields on those accounts includes the information we want populated in the email envelope fields (ex: name = Customer Success Team, first name (email signoff) = Your Customer Success Team, email = success@, etc. – would love to see this work with CTA assignment and other JO steps.

It should be an easy process for pooled CSMs to be able to take advantage of the new group send feature, as well as email assist, playbooks, CTAs, etc. This would let us move our CSMs, TAMs, and onboarding teams out of Outreach.io and into Gainsight, with the end goal of keeping everything in Gainsight, since as we all know, “If it’s not in Gainsight it didn’t happen.”

Our email templates are already built in Gainsight. It’d be great if we could use those existing templates (with all the available tokens) rather than having to rebuild them in Gmail without tokens, or having to use a completely separate system (Outreach) and sync all the required data just to be able to use tokens in those emails, when named-account CSMs already have access to them for their named accounts.

Calendly lets users schedule meetings on behalf of other teammates. Surely we can let pooled CSMs in User Groups send Group Send emails on behalf of a pooled CSM email address?

Agreed - our Product Success Managers (PSM - those that support our customers on a product-specific level) need to be able to use this feature with the customer contacts in their territories in addition to CSMs. For example - a CSM oversees Company A who has Product 1 and 2. We have a unique PSM that supports each of these Products for the customer. They need to be able to send communication at Scale to their contacts as well. 

It is also essential for us that more than one user per Company can reach out to the same contacts using Group Send. Whether this should work via User Groups, Company Teams or some other model I am not sure, but having this limit on 1 CSM is not enough.

Alternatively, if it was possible to lock filters in Home I could even do away with these widget specific restrictions. Because I could just setup an (A OR B) locked filter logic where current user equals either the CSM or TAM, as defined by a lookup through Company.

What ​​​​​​@clingley and ​@Tomas Trijonis said:

We (admins) all have different use cases for how the new Group Send feature will need to be used, but the underlying theme is that multiple users tied to an account should be able to leverage Group Send.

For us, we have CSMs, TAMs, Consultants, CSM Managers, and higher-up levels of managers. In some cases, an account may have a CSM, TAM, Consultant, CSM Manager, and more. In other cases, an account may not have a named CSM or TAM, but may have a pooled CSM team with a CSM Manager and a Consultant. CSMs may be on PTO or unavailable, and the People Lists set up for a given account should be ready to use by anyone with access to that account in Gainsight.

👉 Regardless of how an account is structured, EVERYONE ON THE ACCOUNT TEAM NEEDS GROUP SEND ACCESS. It doesn’t make sense to tie a feature so obviously geared towards a scaled, team-based communication strategy to one specific account rep.

​@ssamarth, I’d love to get you feedback, but the way things are currently set up, to even test the Group Send feature, let alone roll it out to our CSMs, we’d have to create a NEW test account. While we do have a test account currently, since neither ​@kstim or I are listed as the CSM on the account, we can’t do any sort of testing with this feature.

Our CSMs already have another method (Outreach) for contacting the users at their accounts, and would need this to be set up and ready to use from the get-go, rather than something they’d be expected to test. Not only that, but the primary account team (CSMs, TAMs, and CSM Managers) all have the ability to contact their accounts currently, so if we switched or tried to roll this out, it’d just result in confusion.

Just echoing my sentiments. We need more than just the assigned CSM via the standard CSM field to use Group Send.

For example, we have accounts that are not named CSM accounts that have a Renewal Manager who leverages Gainsight. The Renewal Manager is not listed as the CSM, but still needs to utilize this feature.

I had a crazy idea for a crazy workaround to enable this feature for pooled CSM models, but after thinking it through, it would be way to difficult to implement. 

We are planning on using a pooled model and would 100% appreciate expanded ability to use group send.

Very curious ​(@kim_stone, are you listening?)… we’ve got a slightly wonky workaround going for our own pooled CSM model. It involves:

• Salesforce persona for a “Digital CSM” (currently being created)
  • *Note – while this is currently a non-standard CSM/PM field, I’m going to be talking to ​@kstim re: changing to the standard Gainsight CSM field to allow Group Send to work
  • This persona allows “Email Envelope” details to be shared for pooled CSM accounts:
    • Sender Name (Full Name)
    • Sender Email
    • Sender Sign Off (First Name)
• Digital CSM boolean field on C360 summary page
  • This allows easier targeting (may not be necessary once the Salesforce persona is created)
• Gmail alias email

By assigning an account to the Salesforce Digital CSM persona, emails sent to/from those accounts will go the Gmail alias distro group email, which has shared access amongst the pooled CSMs who are responsible for responding to those pooled accounts.

Please, please, please add support for additional roles/users/fields to be able to use Group Send outside of the system standard CSM field. Such a disappointment that this is a strict requirement right now.

​@ssamarth Also echoing the sentiment of all my fellow admins above that we need to be able to provision access to this feature for both User Groups AND custom assigned roles in Gainsight!

Our biggest use cases for this feature are not necessarily our named CSMs, but our Scale CSMs, and also some tangential folks in CS Operations who may wish to send mass comms on behalf of CSMs but that we don’t want to give JO access to, Onboarding Managers, subject matter experts, etc etc. We also have tons of use cases where a CSM is OOO and someone else on their team or their manager needs to be able to cover for them - including contacting their accounts en masse.

We need more flexibility here for anyone on my team to be excited to really adopt this feature. 

This popular concern would very likely have come up had this gone through a proper beta.  Just sayin.

Also pitching in here. We were excited to showcase Group Send to our users, only to find out we are handcuffed by CSM assignment. We have product teams, rather than account teams (but it’s similar enough), and we need allow anyone on the team to be able to send emails using Group Send. 

So we just aren’t able to use this in the current state. What a bummer.

We have multiple CSMs support on a lot of our accounts. We do not use the out of the box CSM field, which means we are unable to even utilize this feature. We need to be able to have either 1) anyone be able to send emails or 2) specify the individuals who can email for each account. As of today, we are unable to utilize this feature at all. Terrible miss. 

I’ll echo ​@rlgreen. Our team structure includes multiple CSMs working across the same accounts, and we don’t leverage the default “CSM” field in Gainsight. Because of this, the current setup for this feature doesn’t work for us.

Ideally, we’d have the ability to either grant email-sending access to any user or define a custom list of senders for each account, preferably the former. Without that flexibility, we’re completely blocked from using the feature in our day-to-day workflows.

It feels like this a massive oversight that Admins should be able to allow any user to email any company person in the system. I’m almost 100% certain Gainsight has customers where there are multiple CS team members are reaching out to a single client for various things.

Our primary use case involves enabling multiple CSMs to send mass communications to contacts across various regions, as we operate within a multi-CSM model. Additionally, we frequently encounter scenarios where a CSM is out of office, and a teammate needs to step in to manage communications with their accounts.

To ensure successful adoption of this feature across our team, it is essential to have greater flexibility in access provisioning.

​@ssamarth - any update on this. Its been 4 months since the feature has been released and many people in the community who are unable to utilize it. With renewal season upon us, it would be great to get an update. 

Echoing ​@rlgreen – enabling Group Send is my next big admin project outside of my normal JOs. Leveraging Group Send templates as part of our workflows would be a fantastic account team QoL update.

this is critical for digital CS.  I would like to understand what admin controls are being considered to make this easy for our end users -