Share and Learn Best Practices

Are there any recommended Test automation tools that we can use to test our Gainsight environment I'm looking for testing the UAT tests that we run on Gainsight when we upgrade to newer builds These UAT tests includes validation of Rules execution, Permissions and access to various features of Gainsight web currently Any advise here will be helpfull

At Gainsight, we’ve built processes that have helped us meet our Customer Success goals. Later on, we realized that the same fundamental processes would allow us to achieve our Teammate Success goals. The analogy between Customer Success and Teammate Success best practices is wonderfully perfect. Each of our 5 areas of best practices for Customer Success has a parallel in Teammate Success: https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-vO0cAxOizl1TlPLJQ6GVKbmAtZbX9T7Y7t1lT0KjgncGNhzEd_umQdjvngo4l7jv9Rck8J6NChDq-RR-zppmEuodw5vpyjMHQG6qyYN0WbLPG2pZN2mkD0ZhGUtDQQbjCHZ4ISwTo learn more about how we leverage this framework, check out my new blog post on

I would like to know how many full access and limited access Gainsight licenses I have in my organization. Is that information visible anywhere?

I'm curious if other folks have been thinking ahead about what topics they're hoping to dig into at Pulse 2017. I just got approval to attend, and have a hit-list of aspects of customer success that we're bringing extra focus to this year, and that I'd love to dive into head-first in Oakland: Live Customer Training How do organizations make boring ol' knowledge transfer into an invigorating customer experience, an exciting job for our trainers, and effective at getting customers not just to [i]understand the product but to [i]use the product? Customer Learning What have organizations done to establish a coordinated strategy of educating customers across many media (email campaigns, live training, documentation, in-app guides, etc.), with a consistent voice and style t'boot? Customer Project Management How formal is too formal? Especially during launch, but also during other parts of the customer journey,

We've been experiencing an issue with the SF tabs not sticking when we select Gainsight in the Force.com Apps menu. So, we can adjust them, and then, the next time we go back in, they have defaulted back to the original layout. Has anyone else had this happen or have suggestions for how to correct? We've been able to get around it by using another Force.com App choice in the dropdown, but would be great if we could figure out how to make them stick using Gainsight.

We are looking for some direction on the key data elements for Invoicing.  What would an Invoicing data set look like? 

How are other storing "documents" related to an account or deployment.   Things like design documents, customer presentations, etc. that we may want to reference in the future.   Have folks incorporated sharepoint or other document repositories within Gainsight?  Store some other way?    Thanks for any feedback. 

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 Hypergr

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.