Our mission is to prove that you can win in business while being human first. So we want to put the spotlight on some of those humans helping Gainsight win in business! This time around, let’s meet our VP of Market Development, Hayley Jean Farr, and hear from her in her own words.
Tell us a bit about yourself and what your role is at Gainsight.
I am based out of my home office in Chelsea, MA—just a few miles outside of Boston—where I live with my husband, David, and our two cats, Wyatt and Watson. In my past life, I led Customer Success and Professional Services Operations at athenahealth where I implemented Gainsight in 2018. I fell in love with the “outcomes-focused” customer success methodology and with Gainsight. Here at Gainsight, I am pioneering a new function, Market Development, where I am identifying scalable ways to target, serve, and support companies outside of SaaS.
What does your day-to-day look like?
Since I’m just a few months in, my typical day-to-day involves a lot of listening and learning! On a typical day, I might join a teammate in Sales for a demo call, speak with a customer who is implementing and looking for practical guidance on how to drive change within their organization, write a blog post, or spend a few hours digging into data to better understand how to apply Gainsight workflows and best practices in specific industries. I’m also super passionate about mentorship and try to meet with one of my four mentees (who truly are mentoring me!) once a week.
At Gainsight, we believe customer success is a company-wide priority. How do you drive customer success in your role?
As I continue to ramp up, I hope to more-and-more drive customer success for prospects and clients as well as my internal customers (Sales and Customer Outcomes Managers). It’s critical for me to listen, challenge assumptions, synthesize information, and provide actionable feedback to all of my cross-functional partners on how we can target, message, and serve organizations in new markets better.
Do you use the Gainsight platform to do your job? If so, how?
When I speak with customers, I’ll review recent timeline entries, some data in the C360, and I’ll enter my notes into Timeline. It’s critical for understanding the context of customers to make better, more informed decisions in my market development research. I absolutely love the Gainsight tool and saw it be tremendously successful at transforming the Customer Success organization at athenahealth because it’s beautiful, super easy to use, and designed with CSMs in mind. Two of the things that impressed me the most about the product before becoming a Gainster were 1) how quickly the product developed new features and functionality and 2) how we were able to have an incredible partnership with the Product department. When I was a customer, I always felt my needs were seen, heard, and understood.
Childlike joy is one of Gainsight’s values. Share a fun fact about yourself or your go-to karaoke song?
A couple of fun facts: My husband and I are avid skiers with a very long ski-bucket list—top of the list is skiing in Japan and the Dolomites in Italy. My signature fashion statement is gold shoes; I have about 12 pairs. Sadly, y’all can’t see them on a conference call. I’m also super passionate about gender-equity, and am excited to be one of the founding members of Ellevate, Gainsight’s internal teammate resource group focused on gender-equity.
What’s your favorite thing about working at Gainsight?
I’ve been really intentional about working for mission-driven companies throughout my career. I’m so proud to have joined a company that is making such a difference in the lives of client-facing folks and their customers while being mindful of our own social impact. Many years ago, as I was ramping up in an operations role, I managed three SMB clients for about six months in order to better learn the business. It was the most challenging job I’ve ever had—I didn’t have the tools to identify, prioritize, and execute in the role and was super reliant on the knowledge of my amazing peers. I’ve seen first hand what a difference Gainsight can make in helping client-facing folks to feel more supported, confident, and enabled to truly help customers succeed.
