Share and Learn Best Practices

I'd like guidance on how others have their CSMs track interactions with customers (emails, phone calls, meetings, etc.) in Salesforce and how they map these interactions in Gainsight using milestones or other reporting. Our team does not have a current standard on how to track customer interactions in Salesforce which is frustrating to our Sales team and as I roll out a clear standard of how we are going to use Salesforce to show visibility into our interaction with customers, I'd appreciate guidance on how other Gainsight customers do this. Thanks in advance for your help!

Some CSMs spend only a small part of their day in Gainsight. Others spend their entire day in Gainsight. We're curious to hear how we could move the needle towards CSMs spending more time in Gainsight. If you are a CSM who only spends a small part of your day in Gainsight, what are the barriers to increasing product usage?

(1) What's the best way to measure NPS as part of CSM's performance metrics using a manager's dashboard or report? (2) We can set up a report by CSM by month with % of detractors, passives, and promoters as a column chart. Is there a way to get the actual NPS score by month by CSM? 

My role, and our org, are relatively new to the Gainsight world. We're going through and consolidating CTA Types and CTA Reasons to use. My main question revolves around how detailed should we start out with CTA Reasons? For example, we have Risk, Lifecycle, Objective, Opportunity and Event as our CTA Types. We could have a reason for Engagement Risk (customer has not engaged in a lengthy period of time) and Engagement Opportunity (regular follow up with Customer) - I know these are very high level examples. Any recommendations for breaking down Reasons into Risk/Opportunities as well, or keep them high level as that will be specified within the Type? Thanks!

The “right way” to do Customer Success varies significantly across countries in Europe. There are certainly commonalities - in particular, Customer Success tends to be higher-touch in Europe than in the U.S. - but it’s mission-critical for a CSM team to vary its approach by country. Check out a new blog post written by several executives in the Gainsight community: https:// http://www.gainsight.com/2017/01/31/guide-customer-success-across-europe/. We welcome you to add your learnings from your own experiences, so that we can continue to supplement our perspectives.

Before our executives have a meeting with a customer they ask to get an Executive Summary report (for which we built a template). This report includes details from various places - All of them are already in SF or GS. For example:  Key contacts, Open opportunities, NPS Score, Product purchased. Is there a way to have GS pull these info from all these sources and generate a PDF/Word file that can be sent to the executive?

I'm trying to set up a report to get a snapshot of a Customer's Scorecard when they decide to cancel (we store this date of cancellation at the Customer level). Is there a way to set up a report to track these over time? Does anyone have a good example of what they use for this? Thanks!!

Hi guys I'm new with SF/GS but I'm trying to figure out a thing. I would like to know if has form to register a informantion from a field in another one every last day of the month. For then take the difference betwen months in a formula of other field. I have an idea to do with rule engin but not clear what to do. How could i do this in the best way?

Looking for some best practice insights. So we are still ramping up with Gainsight and we've come across a few self inflicted data integrity issues with respects to our Customer Info object data. The issue stems from changes in processes upstream in the way we were managing opportunities in SFDC. We've sorted out the process now so going forward things are good. Here's my question. I want to clean up the few data integrity issues we have by updating the opportunity records with active subscriptions associated with them. I'm looking for a rule that would enable me to make updates to the opportunity record and then subsequently update the customer info object using a daily rule. Essentially this is a rule that enable me to maintain the opportunity record and then maintain the data in the Customer Info Object. Thoughts?

We want to have as many scores set as possible on all our accounts.  There are some instances where a field is blank or is not eligible yet, but we want a score.  For example: Customer has never submitted an NPS or is too new to have cases.  I tried setting the NPS score based on null value....no luck Is there a way to do this? Otherwise, my backup is to add it to my rule that essentially defaults all the scores

January 31 at 10:00-11:30 AM PT - Gainsight Roadmap Webinar -- Register Gainsight's VP of Product, Karl Rumelhart, shares what's planned for Gainsight's product roadmap and what it means for you. Gainsight has a major release planned for Feb. 21, so you'll want to tune in and see a preview of what's coming soon, as well as what we're working on for future releases!

Our team is developing a best practices guide for Account Management teams using Gainsight. Can you share how Account Managers are using Gainsight in your organization? Thanks!

How does your Customer Success team structure commissions? Do you factor in retention, renewals, and expansion?  We've written about how we recognize and reward CSMs here, but we're interested in hearing from you! 

Looking for some 1:Many ideas for CTAs, reports, communications. Please share ideas regardless of how established your 1:Many program is.

One of the most common questions I get is: How do you compensate your CSMs? The metrics that drive our CSMs’ bonuses are: Net number of “Wins”: Specifically, a certain net number of customers that moved into a state of Green or Lime Habits, which is an indication of sticky adoption and a proxy for whether the customer is getting value from our product Customer Success Qualified Leads (CSQLs): Our CSMs partner with Sales by identifying expansion opportunities Customer Success Qualified Advocacy (CSQA): Our CSMs have targets for the advocacy engagements they secure For more information on how we compensate CSMs, check out my new blog post on How We Structure CSM Bonuses. I’d love to hear from you – what factors contribute to your CSM compensation?

Hypergrowth is a mountain that only gets steeper as you climb. And we’re probably 5% of the way up. We’ve made it to this point because, above all, we love the climb so much that we keep putting one foot in front of the other. When I look at my broader philosophy for managing through hypergrowth in a CS organization, there are 7 principles that I try to follow: Conquer uncertainty. Create a vision...and talk about it all the time. Clarify what counts as success. Execution matters. Exhale positivity. Learn constantly. Express gratitude. What challenges are you encountering as your company grows and how are you addressing them? To hear more about my principles of hypergrowth, check out my blog post on The CCO’s Guide to Managing through Hypergrowth.

Does anyone have a CSM job description they regularly leverage? The desired skill set and job description will vary depending on touch model and org structure, but I'm interested in gathering a few samples! 

We are exploring the use of Success Plans for onboarding new customers. I have begun to build the plan templates and the objectives inside those templates. I thought I could add/tie a CTA to an objective in a Success Plan, but cannot figure out how to do it. The objective just shows "Tasks (0)".  Any guidance on this?  I will admit we are not currently using CTAs or Tasks anywhere else (yet) so this may be a simple question.

Yellow is the new Red (or is it?) -- How have you defined your grading scheme, measures, and weights for your Customer Success 360 Scorecard? I'm hoping to compare our setup with others. Our grading scheme: Our measures and weights:

Hi! We are new to Gainsight and are busy creating rules, rules and more rules. We are using the recommending naming conventions of "Scorecard:" if the rule is related to the health score and "CTA:" if the rule is related to a CTA. Locating rules in Gainsight is going well. What we are struggling with is the perfect template to track rules, the triggers, the actions, etc from an Administrator perspective. Does anyone have a great excel template they are using to track rules outside of Gainsight? We want to track the steps that need to be taken to trigger the rule and then the actions that will occur once the rule runs (without going into Gainsight to review every rule individually). Thank you! 

Gainsight is rolling out a new "Habits" metric! Habits is our term for adoption, since our goal is to encourage our customers to adopt good habits in using our product.  Our previous Habits measuring used the following methodology: Habits 1.0 Formula: DAUs / Full Licenses Sold Scoring: Green: At least 20% of Full Licenses Sold are daily active users of Cockpit Lime: At least 60% of Full Licenses Sold are daily active users (of any part of the product) Yellow: Some usage in past week, but not reaching Green or Lime level Orange: Less than 10% of Full Licenses Sold are daily active users (of any part of the product) Red: No usage of Gainsight in the last week For more information on the previous Habits methodology, check out this blog post. Problems we uncovered with our method: It doesn’t isolate effect of phased license deployment Green could be false positive, threshold was too low Denominato

We need to write a rule that allows you to grab a NPS survey response to update a field in Salesforce. Can a Rule pull specific survey answers? How do you pull answers from a survey in the Rules Engine. Example - If they gave us a 9-10, we could have a “Became Advocate Date” on X date. We need the date to create a PowerList, but that is another question. 

When hiring a CSM, do you look for a hybrid set of attributes (sales, project management, implementations, technical, support, etc)?  If so, how should you focus your efforts in finding this talent?  Should new hires have a strong grasp of the industry domain?  There are a lot checkboxes to check when looking for a candidate, and not everyone will meet all the criteria.

When a survey participant does not respond to a survey, what is the best practice recommendation on sending follow up surveys?  What frequency and how many follow ups are advisable?

How have you structured your Customer Success and Operations teams? Does Ops report to the VP of Customer Success or COO? If you have two teams, how do you differentiate responsibilities?  [i]We've written about our org structure [i]here[i] and [i]here[i], but we'd love to hear from you.