Share and Learn Best Practices

There are many times where I see an interesting post here on the community board and it would great if there is a share/email button. 

I would like to be able to use the Gainsight Subject Area "Milestones" in a bionic rule as a data set. I want to marry milestones to data in MDA and even the activity feed.  It would also be nice to trigger CTA's based on Milestones created. 

Hello,  I am currently starting an implementation of Gainsight and we are required to create some new salesforce fields that I am looking to see if anyone has found a good way to create them (possible with CPQ as well). The fields are: Original Contract Date  Must be a date field type. This identifies the date a customer signed on. Current Contract Start Date  Must be a date field type. Current Contract End Date  Must be a date field type.As well, we have some salesforce accounts that have multiple active contracts, so I am not sure what might be the best way to solve for that.  I have tried to build a rollup summary field but I can only use a number field type for that. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

During Pulse 2017 the Gainsight Client Outcomes Team organized a Circles of Success & Birds of a Feather Program, featuring group discussions for Gainsight customers focused on key topics and challenges. We had such engagement from our customers we wanted to keep the conversation going on Community. One of the topics we discussed was Customer Success for On-Prem Companies. Here are a few of the questions that we discussed: How are other companies paying for on prem customer success? What are the best practices in working with on prem or hybrid customers? What’s the best way to capturing customer's perception of value and customer expectation of a solution?Please share your best practices on this thread to keep the conversation going (include the specific question in your post). Please also follow this thread if you're interested in additional Circles of Success activities related to Customer Success for On-Prem Companies. 

I have been speaking with several people who are working to solve for Partners and Distributors in Gainsight. I'd like to begin the conversation here and then carry it on in a networking group if there is interest.  I've included some of the questions that have come up in discussions: What criteria is being used to score partner health? What were the successful approaches taken to drive adoption with the channel team? [list] What were the unsuccessful ones? What kinds of CTAs are in place for Channel Managers? How are the CAMs/CSMs/AEs collaborating with others in the organization? How are are notes regarding the Partner being collected and/or consolidated? How is the Channel partnership being valued/tracked?  What is considered success or value for the partner?How do you include Gainsight as part of your discussion of a Partner's portfolio health? What do you use to determine when you intervene when a customer in a Partner's portfolio is declining in health?[/list]

Would like to be able to share the scorecard via a scheduled outreach for weekly reporting (via email) of customer health to internal stakeholders.  Today, when creating a report for scorecard data - the values returned for scorecard are either 0-100 or hex color code. 

During Pulse 2017 the Gainsight Client Outcomes Team organized a Circles of Success & Birds of a Feather Program, featuring group discussions for Gainsight customers focused on key topics and challenges. We had such engagement from our customers we wanted to keep the conversation going on Community. One of the topics we discussed was Paid Customer Success Offerings. Here are a few of the questions that we discussed: Are there any examples of organizations who are successfully generating profit through Paid Customer Success Offerings? Any advice from moving to a paid-for services model? What offerings to you offer customers from an onboarding or support perspective? How did you decided what to offer as a paid service? What is your discovery process for paid CS offerings? Do you have a mix of offerings, or just one or the other? How did you communicate this change to clients? What was their feedback? How have

I understand that the Customer Info object in SF and the Company MDA table work very similarly in that they are regularly updated copies of information from other SF objects.  Can someone explain to me the pros and cons of each and whether or not it's recommended to use one over the other?  It seems like I'm repeating a lot of the same work to have all fields represented in both places.  Thanks! 

Posting the request on behalf of customer- Change CSM meter from 100 positions to the 5 that we are using: 0, 25, 50, 75, or 100." There should be the option to use milestones instead of all 100 options to make it less granular. 1. We need numerical scores to roll into overall health score data  2. We do not have enough business cases to justify all 100 options, we are focused on 5 options (0, 25, 50, 75, 100)  3. The letter system is interesting, but needs to be numeric

How do various teams handle the following? Say you have 10 CSMs, a sales team of 40, and a 2 Product Managers. 10 CSMs will have full access to gainsight using most of its features. What's the best practice for getting a view into gainsight activity for the sales team and product managers? They only need 'view' access into account activity, health score, etc. I know there are multiple solutions for this, but I'm wondering what are your best practices?

We are in the very early planning stages of our Gainsight implementation.  This is my second time to go through the process, but at my previous company we did not drive actions at the product level - it was primarily at the business unit level. Where I am now, we have 3 core product families each with their own individual products, each with it's own feature set. Sometimes customers have 1 or 2 products within a single family - not always implemented at the same time, but sometimes they are. Sometimes customers have all the products in a particular family, but they are implemented independently of one another at various times. Sometimes customers have multiple products from different product families.  It is similar to a choose your own adventure book. I would like to talk to other Gainsight customers who may have similar use cases.  I am curious to know how others have tackled this A) at the customer level (without using Relationships) and 😎 using Relation

Is there a way to set up a quick search for Gainsight in the Chrome bar? For example, our users have this set up where “SFDC” and [customer name] will automatically search SFDC for that customer's name. It saves time & we've gotten feedback from CSMs that something like that for Gainsight will make it faster to use.

Hi, I'm looking into CS efficiency metrics and best practices. Can anyone share how they track and analyze efficiency?  What are the KPI's driven by efficiency and why? How to maximize CSM output with the same resources?

How do various teams handle the following? Say you have 10 CSMs, a sales team of 40, and a 2 Product Managers. 10 CSMs will have full access to gainsight using most of its features. What's the best practice for getting a view into gainsight activity for the sales team and product managers? They only need 'view' access into account activity, health score, etc. I know there are multiple solutions for this, but I'm wondering what are your best practices?

We are looking into whether or not using Relationships to drive product adoption will make sense for us, as well as how we may leverage Scorecard 2.0 at  both the Customer and Relationship level.  Seems like it could get pretty complex, so I'm looking for other Gainsight customers willing to share details of their success leveraging these features in this way.   If this applies to you and you'd be willing to share, please feel free to email me:  jeffrey.kirkpatrick@kronos.com. Thanks!

Is there a way to set up a quick search for Gainsight in the Chrome bar? For example, our users have this set up where “SFDC” and [customer name] will automatically search SFDC for that customer's name. It saves time & we've gotten feedback from CSMs that something like that for Gainsight will make it faster to use.

I was speaking with a few fellow CSMs last night and we were discussing where our CSM team ultimately lived within the organization. Some were a function of the sales team, others (like mine) are a function of the Client Services team. Some liked the fact that they were under sales as it made being tasked with revenue growth and account expansion easier to undertake. For me, I like that I'm not under sales so that I have the added credibility of not being a salesperson and my upsell recommendations come across as more genuine. Where does your CSM team live and what do you see as the pros vs cons of your structure?

Hi Gainsight Community, We are currently researching use cases for a new offering, 'Gainsight for Professional Services'. If you are using Gainsight in any Professional Services context - whether you collaborate with your ProServ team on Gainsight data or run a 'ProServ'-like process out of Gainsight let us know! We'd love to setup a discovery call with you to learn more about what you're doing. Please respond here or email me at mforshaw@gainsight.com. Thank you in advance for your time! Marie Sr. PMM

I am very curious to learn how other SaaS companies are demonstrating the business value of your solution to your clients. Namely: how are you determining WHAT the measurable business value is? when/how do you take current state baselines of those metrics, with your clients? when/how do you set goals for those metrics, with your clients? when/how do you report on progress against those goals? are you using ROI metrics associated with revenue? are you using KPIs associated with achievement of your client's business goals? are you using KPIs associated with adoption/usage? are you using KPIs associated with end-user satisfaction? what processes and tools are you using to operationalize all of this?I consider this the most important pillar of customer success. Do you?

I'm curious to learn what types of success plans people are creating other than at-risk or a standard success plan.

Hi, has anyone had success configuring editable list views and inline editing from a list in Gainsight? We've built a view in SFDC that allows users to easily make updates to multiple accounts without clicking into each record, but haven't been able to replicate in Gainsight. Thanks in advance!

I'm looking for some help in how folks are combining Success Plans with CTAs. Any experts out there want to help me out with a coaching session? Cheers - Jon

Does anyone have questions on Bionic rules, please share them with us.We will add them as part of the documentation and share them with you.

Looking for suggestions from the field on best use case for the following scenario from an admin's perspective... We'd like to pull a report across multiple objects (i.e. opportunity, account, customer info) that we can review upcoming Customer Success owned renewals each quarter. The strategic part I'm trying to figure out is how do we track a couple of key questions that we will fill out during our meeting and store them so we can push this information upstream at any time. What are your suggestions for the best area to do this: 1) Data spaces - my initial go-to. Relatively easy to pull this info into a report, but I'm not sure the best way to capture information from our meetings. 2) MDA - Another thought was to build a table and either feed this via rules engine, or just to upload information manually via csv after each meeting (since this will only be quarterly). This is a little more high maintenance but we could add in a column for date tracking. Any suggestions off of these

Has anyone found a successful way of tracking an SOW that is outside the scope of an opportunity? For example, if a statement of work has been signed which is open-ended for a period of time, it is not captured within an opportunity today. Preferably, I would still like to be able to capture that revenue in an opportunity or perhaps as a separate identifiable way. Thank you in advance for the ideas!