Share and Learn Best Practices

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.

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 

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.

What alternate names have you heard or considered for your Customer Success team? For example:  Client Outcomes Onboarding Services Adoption Services

Leverage Success Plans. Success Plans help you create a roadmap (sometimes known as account plan) for achieving your customer’s objectives. Demonstrate value to your customer with tailored content from Success Snapshots, which automate meeting presentation preparation. Track your interaction using Milestones. Milestones represent major events in the customer journey. Examples of milestones include key onboarding stages, health check, training delivery, QBR/EBR, annual renewal, and marketing campaigns. You

Leverage Success Plans. Success Plans help you create a roadmap (sometimes known as account plan) for achieving your customer’s objectives. Demonstrate value to your customer with tailored content from Success Snapshots, which automate meeting presentation preparation. Track your interaction using Milestones. Milestones represent major events in the customer journey. Examples of milestones include key onboarding stages, health check, training delivery, QBR/EBR, annual renewal, and marketing campaigns. You

How do the different elements of your CS department affect your income statement? A quote from Andy, VP of Customer Experience, at Version One:   Outcomes management seems like it would fall into COGS. With a 15% investment on recurring ARR that seems like your CSMs would put pressure on your Gross Product Margin %. The costs for your CS Sales Rep are clearly an Operating Expense. That should give you great margins on upsell, which feels right to me.  I.e. we believe that investing in customer success provides a lower product margin, but that lower margin is offset by protection of the renewal rate and more predictable LTV. Additionally, it generates Upsell revenue very efficiently. Basically what I’m saying is companies that invest in Customer Success should have a lower Gross Product Margin % during the transition period, but if the investment pays off then CAC will be lowered by more efficient Upsell and 

Does anybody know how to set-up a rule in the rules engine that does the following: Run a rule nightly that searches for any open CTA's with a "type" of relationship scorecard and if one exists the scorecard will be updated to a certain score. We have a relationship group scorecard called "Content". We want the rule to search for any open CTA's for this scorecard nightly and update the score accordingly. If you look at the attached rule action,I want to copy step 2 & 3 for a relationship scorecard but there doesn't seem to be a way to do this... Any help would be greatly appreciated

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Follow a CSM Transition Playbook. You can either create your own, or ask an admin to download a pre-built one from Vault. This ensures that CSMs with transferred accounts are all following the same steps. Here are some recommended tasks from the CSM Transition Playbook: [list=1] Conduct internal transition meeting with new CSM; update CSM field in CRM Introduce new CSM to customer Create milestone for new CSM Align with customer on objectives & outline next steps Ahead of any customer meeting, review all existing Success Plans for the account. Success Plans contain a roadmap (sometimes known as acco

We recommend CSMs check CTAs in the Cockpit every morning. First, navigate to the “Cockpit” tab https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/WK1xZr9JUJWb11jVAHBJEbEVTGS9dilOUu1rZp83BKiJGhXNI__vJIkRV55DOOaVCEUP6OCyvchjLJlAcfUKdObgFvHbXJoXL1PSMB8btFdD37WZUJowcOKLN5JEeg70H2O8nKJp Find a Call-to-Action, or CTA https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/tLwp-HF4wdP88Oo26fQwq-yOvZzxoWSiWV-8Q8pSY6DWjpmIoJGSsR95mkqQ8kodi6ipp13eB_4OjXNNjcQo5mAvhZHj-v-mkeq_5bgV7nSB03Xrtn8R2gHHqF3pJ

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