Looking back, I’ve always been a builder. It started back in the 1980’s, where I spent every afternoon and weekend hanging around my parents’ interior design store in McKinney, Texas.
It was my first true taste of entrepreneurship – of building something from the ground up and putting everything you had into making it a success. Of building and managing budgets and always trying to make things more simple and efficient. And of making sure that every single customer was happy, successful, and guaranteed to come back or recommend us to their neighbors and friends, as the business was nearly 100% referral-based.
Little did I know how decades later, I would apply those early-life lessons as I launched my first business and then eventually my first SaaS company. From the get-go, two things were always top of mind:
- I had to innovate, disrupt and drive simplicity and time savings if I wanted to differentiate.
- Sure, I had to market and sell – but customer success had to be priority #1 from day #1.
In fact, I was such a believer in customer success, that I made it one of my first two hires when launching my SaaS company, Allbound. Not surprisingly, when I decided to host our first conference, I knew exactly who my keynote speaker would be — Nick Mehta.
That brings me to today. My love for customer success eventually brought me to Gainsight. I guess you could call it a match made in heaven. About nine months ago, we decided to take a hard, honest look at our own customer journey, hiring a world-class consulting firm, Method Garage. Their co-founders Justin Zacks and Saul Gurdus, would help us dig in and learn exactly how the market — both customers and non-customers — perceived Gainsight.
To be honest, a lot of what we heard wasn’t always easy to hear:
- Larger, more mature companies love Gainsight. Businesses with more mature organizations, leaders, processes, and systems were the most likely to succeed with Gainsight and the least likely to be intimidated by the change and transformation that a platform like ours could yield.
- Companies who were earlier in their journey weren’t quite as sure and oftentimes didn’t have as great of an experience when engaging with our solutions. They all WANTED to start with Gainsight’s technology, best practices, and community, but more often than not, they just didn’t feel like they were ready. As a result, many had decided to start with what they perceived to be a more lightweight, simple CS tool, knowing that they would eventually migrate to Gainsight.
The message from the market was clear — it was time for Gainsight to evolve. Customer success had arrived for companies of all shapes and sizes, and it was our responsibility to make it easier for businesses at any stage in their CS journey to have a clear and concise path to start and scale with Gainsight.
So we did. And today’s launch of Gainsight Essentials is also a celebration of how we’ve taken the Gainsight that the market knows and loves and made it easier in five ways:
- Easier to Buy: we started with more simple and affordable packaging that makes Gainsight easier to buy and easier on your budget. Now you can start with the essential features and capabilities you need to centralize your data, get clear visibility into customer health, automate and drive efficiency into key processes, without feeling overwhelmed or overspent.
- Easier to Implement: Essentials customers can start getting value out of the platform in as little as two weeks by taking advantage of pre-built integrations with Salesforce, Microsoft, HubSpot, and other leading platforms, as well as streamlined processes that make onboarding easier and faster.
- Easier to Use: over the past 18 months, we’ve added more than 20 world-class designers to our product team, making design and user experience part of our DNA. During that time, we’ve redesigned more than 80% of the platform’s interface and continue to iterate and optimize for both end-users and administrators.
- Easier to Admin: one of our proudest accomplishments over the past decade has been the growth of the Gainsight Administrator as a flourishing career choice for thousands of individuals worldwide. However, not every company has the need or resources to hire a dedicated admin right from the get-go. With Essentials and Essentials Plus, we’ve solved this by not only reducing admin requirements but also providing fractional admin support as part of our new packaging. With Essentials Plus, customers have access to a named Customer Success Manager, as well as a fractional Customer Success Solutions Consultant to help offset their first-year admin costs while setting their foundation to grow.
- Easier to Grow: last, but certainly not least, we’ve made it easier for companies to start and scale with Gainsight and turn net revenue retention (NRR) into the north star of their business. Now companies can start with the world’s most powerful customer success platform without having to worry about outgrowing or having to migrate from another lightweight tool that can’t scale with them. With Gainsight, you can start with the features and capabilities you need, and simply turn on more as you need to. No fuss, no hassle, no messy data migrations required.
And it doesn’t stop there. As the pioneer in customer success and having become leaders in both product experience and community over the years, we’re thrilled to continue giving back through our thought leadership and community of more than 20k customer success and product leaders worldwide. Alongside Gainsight Essentials, we’re excited to launch:
- Essentials.Gainsight.com, an entirely new website and online resource center that we’ll continue to load with more best practices, tools, tips, guides, videos, events, and more for early-stage maturity customer success teams.
- Essentials Accelerator, an exclusive program featuring bootcamps, mentorship, office hours, webinars, and more, dedicated to helping new Essentials customers build their modern growth engine alongside a cohort of like-minded professionals at similar stages of their journey.
You’ll also see Essentials get embedded into our flagship Pulse conferences as they return to San Francisco and London later this year.
Today is a HUGE day for Gainsight – and, to be honest, for me. Every time I speak with a founder or entrepreneur or earlier-stage business leader, I give them the same advice I followed in 2014: Start and scale your company with customer success as a priority. Now, I can help countless organizations across industries turn those words into actions.
Join me, and see for yourself by visiting https://essentials.gainsight.com.
