Perspectives from Gainsight

Hey everyone, We are currently exploring the possibility of merging our Marketing, Sales, and CS Ops teams to create a Revenue Ops Organization in our company. Together with the Head of Sales Ops I’m working on a proposal which we will put in front of the Leadership team in November, where we aim to get buy-in from them to move forwards. I’d love to connect with Revenue Ops Leaders who successfully transitioned from siloed Ops teams to a single Ops team. Specifically, I’m curious to understand:How did you manage the change process? How did you maintain close relationships with the commercial teams? What have been the key factors for success? What have been the main challenges you faced? What would you have do differently if you had to do it again? It would be awesome to connect for a short call, or via email, to get your insights on these topics. Please reach out if you can

Scalability is a hot topic in the Customer Success community. Also for us, handling a larger number of customers with the same (or only slightly increasing) number of CSM's is becoming a bigger focus every year. I'm sure many of you have had the same challenge over the last years.Leveraging technology and automation typically is a large part of the answer to this challenge. As we are using Gainsight CS intensively as our central CS platform, I hope to be contributing to this challenge by leveraging even more of the great functionalities the platform offers.I'm currently looking at options to assess their potential impact. Hence my question to this community: what is the one thing you implemented in Gainsight that really helped your CS Team scale and how is it being used in your company?

Hi - we are still fairly new to Gainsight and I wanted to hear more about how we can manage risk effectively in G. Our current process is quite well mapped out and we have a good risk matrix, escalation process and weekly review in place. At the moment we were going to create a new timeline activity called risk and use this to drive our weekly meetings. Is this right.? I see on the Gainsight webinars that the healthscore card is used. ThanksSonia

I’m curious if there are others out there using the healthscore they’ve created as a KPI for CSM annual performance. This is something my company is looking to do. If so, what is your experience? How did you goal your CSMs? How do you track it on a regular basis? What pushback/challenges have you run into? Any feedback or insight is appreciated!

Hey Team, When adding a single Person into the People Maps view and refresh the page-the single person map disappears. Would it be possible to add people to the map without Connections? This would stay as a reminder and can help individuals gather more information about his hierarchy and influencers. In the customers words- “For example, we have a new account and want to note that John Smith is the 'Decision Maker'. We'd add John Smith, but we haven't yet gotten to the point where we know who reports to him or who his manager is. We want to call him out as someone important and include him on the people map so we know as we have continued conversations with this customer that we need to gather more information about his hierarchy and influencers.”

Hi everyoneWe are new to Gainsight. We currently communicate with customers using zendesk ( for customers onboarding) as it captures threads well and nothing is lost. Now we are on Gainsight I don’t want to use Zendesk anymore, however the Gmail sync with Gainsight doesn’t log threads to the timeline and I’m worried we will loose track of customer communications.I wondering what everyone else does.? Do you use Gainsight, Gmail sync to timeline or do you still use zendesk.? Thanks for you insight!Sonia

Does anyone out there have experience with servicing customers with a "group" of CSMs instead of a single CSM? Our team is currently exploring the idea of grouping several CSMs together along with a more junior member and having this group collectively service a patch of customers. The thought here is that the more junior member would learn on the job by supporting the CSMs with the more tactical/day-to-day request while the more senior member focus on the strategic aspects: conducting EBRs, stakeholder engagement, adoption, etc. We're hoping that this would also help mitigate the friction/pains of account transitions when a CSM moves roles or leaves the company entirely. Instead of being assigned a completely new CSM, the customer would still have the familiar names and faces of their dedicated CSM group. Thoughts? Would love to hear if anyone else has experimented with this and/or has other ideas for reducing account transition pains. If so,

Hi Admins!Those of you actively working with SFDC Sandboxes may be familiar that Gainsight provides migration a tool to migrate assets from sandbox to production or production to sandbox.  Since the migration process may need the login access/credentials, are you hesitant about sharing Production access to the one who is doing migration? There’s an alternative for this.Are you aware also that this migration is also possible without using the conventional way of providing username and password?

We are migrating to Salesforce lightning  and we are a NXT edition customer. Are there any issues/caveats we should be aware off during and after the migration when it comes to Gainsight? 

Is anyone using Einstein currently that could comment on functionality versus GS? I'm obviously going to do some research and have reached out to our GS CSM, but thought I'd try here too.

If you work in multiple Gainsight Nxt environments (ex: production, sandboxes, or other instances), you’ve probably lost your Chrome Tab along the way. Which tab is production and which one is the Sandbox? Where’s my sandbox tab? I’ve run into the same issue when administering multiple Salesforce environments and luckily, someone built an extension for that. Find out more about Salesforce Colored Favicons in my previous productivity hacks article here.Working in multiple tabs is pretty much standard nowadays. I can’t imagine ever being in Chrome and just having on tab open. Especially when I’m promoting changes to Produc

Background: We've created an Executive C360 for their sponsorship calls that summarizes key information rather than being the detailed CSM version (assuming that's a common scenario) Goal: We'd like to run a snapshot that mimics the same information in the same format we've provided in the C360. This way they can have this detail on paper at any point during their meetings if not directly in front of a computer (You know, the age old thing of true face to face interaction without screens? It's wonderful) Issues:  1) A) The C360 snapshot is pulling in views we're not utilizing and creating a prescribed view that carries useless information. See attachments for comparisons of summary (data not complete).. sorry for the scribbles     😎 Also missing other key sections besides scorecard.  2) Success snapshots does not allow me to mimic this information either. Not finding much use. If anyone has sugg

Does anyone use a customer survey before a renewal to understand propensity to renew or to get a pulse on customer sentiment? If so, what are you asking and when? We've heard of some doing the NPS survey at some # of months before renewal, but what other questions help you gauge risk?

As we continue to use Gainsight for Outreaches/Programs and Cockpit/Email Assist, we are running into a frequent situation where a participant has been added to the bounce list and then cannot be sent further emails through Gainsight - Journey Orchestrator or Email Assist. However, using the Email Validator under Administration > Email Configuration, we can typically find the email domain as blocking, reporting our sends as spam, or other errors that aren't indicative of an email address that no longer exists. As an Admin, I have permissions to view results of the Email Validator and remove emails from the bounce list one at a time. Our CSMs do not have this permission so they encounter a roadblock when trying to send an email in Email Assist or determine why a contact did not receive an email from one of our Programs (typically an operational notification). I can/have created a report of Hard Bounces and the message that was received (similar to emai

We have used Gainsight for a few months primarily focusing on Timeline and our CSM dashboard. We are now creating our approach for success planning. Prior to finalizing our template and having CSMs leverage this functionality, we want to have a success plan example to share with CSMs that demonstrates a focus on a customer’s time-based goals and measurable outcomes. Does anyone have a success plan example they are willing to share? Thanks!!

Individual CSMs have been reaching to our admin team requesting for a bunch of CTAs that are no longer relevant for them to be deleted. What approval process have you implemented in your organizations to make sure your admin team gets documented approval to delete CTAs. We want to avoid a situation where we just delete CTAs and activities based on the CSM’s request without leadership visibility? What are some best practices you use or a process you’d suggest? Thanks!

I love using Gainsight on Chrome. It’s been said many times before that Chrome is the best browser to use now days for its security, ease of use, and speed. But the real reason I love Gainsight on Chrome is because of the extensions!Chrome extensions are small apps that are built to sit on top of Chrome and extend its functionality. They typically serve a small single purpose like ad blocking, password protection, or to easily

Hi folks, Our customer base is quite atypical - we work with farmers. As you can probably assume, seasonality is therefore a huge factor in everything we do. As we begin to plan out the revamp of our health scorecard and think about our risk escalations, we are attempting to determine the best way of catering to the seasonality we know we face. For example, if usage is below X in January, that’s totally ok; but if it is below X in July, that is a huge red flag. To top it off, these seasons can vary between farms based on the type of crop they are focused on. That level of segmentation is a bit rough in our database, but I am working on making that information more useful as well. I would love to hear any ideas or thoughts on how to approach this!

To nail the post-sales to CS handoff with your new customers, there are several critical components. Some of our Gainsight leaders gathered their thoughts into a playbook to share with you in this recent blog post.The high level plan:1. Define a taxonomy of outcomes2. Create a simple way for sales to capture the client’s desired outcomes3. Operationalize a Success Plan to map to the pre-sales definition of outcomes automatically4. Build the Success Plan into the product5. Demonstrate valueCheck out the blog for the details on how to transform the CS journey across your company!

Nick Mehta, Gainsight’s CEO, recently shared a blog post about how the best CSMs are often naturally human-first in their approach to work. Specifically, they demonstrate the ability to: See clients as people (or a bunch of people!) Recognize different stakeholders in an org have different goals, and to look for opportunities to connect them Connect people and companies with others like them Drive career success for the people they work with in their current org and beyond Read more here, and also be sure to check out these upcoming webinars on related topics: The Customer Success Professional’s Book Club Discussion (July 29)

Our CCO, Ashvin Vaidyanathan, recently listened to a podcast with SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin about “16 Rookie Errors Founders Make Pitching to VCs”. Ashvin distilled his learnings from the session and applied them to CS professionals.  Here are a few highlights: Make that email to a customer count. Give props to their teammates whom you work with regularly. Share some value metrics (“YTD we’ve saved you $X in costs”). If you don’t have value metrics, share some adoption metrics (“your company is among the top 20 percentile of users among all our customers”). Ask for a minimal amount of time (“15-20 mins works best”) and offer something back to them for their time. Send your deck as a PDF and not a link. This also means your deck should present itself if you’re not there to present it. Fo

Is there any concession for unemployed CSM enthusiasts to get Gainsight certified?

Calling all admins! We’re looking for Gainsight game changers with big ideas to contribute to the newly announced Sightline Vault.   Sightline Vault is all about harnessing the power of our admin community to make your best practices available to all -- in just a click. Think: NPS JO templates, your favorite playbooks, healthscore configurations, and other Gainsight best practices you can’t live without and want to share with the world.    What’s in it for you:  Your name in lights! (...almost!) You’ll be credited on any of the solutions you suggest that we publish and we'd love to further showcase you as an admin! Your favorite template or configuration, built to help thousands of future admins The opportunity to influence an amazing program for customer success technologists   What we need from you: Share suggestions - favorite templates, configurations, dashboa

In the below document, I have explained how to calculate the every 6th month anniversary dates and store in a separate field so that we use it to send surveys( whenever you wants to send NPS survey who completed 6 months), use it in rules and reports wherever required. Since I am creating a formula  field in Sfdc and bringing it into Gainsight, this work-around will be applicable only customers on salesforce platform   Calculate the anniversary dates(every 6 months)

Missed our webinar last week on “Work Faster with Gainsight Features You Don't Know that You Already Have”? You’re in luck, you can find the full recording here:     In this two-part webinar, Josh Weber, Senior Client Outcomes Manager, will first introduce you to these features and how to use them to your advantage, followed by step-by-step setup instructions and a demo by Altamash Syed, Senior Support Analyst.