By Tim Van Lew, Director of Customer Success Strategy, Gainsight
Yes, it’s uncommon to see a year-in-review article in spring. While the economic challenges of the last couple months may have some of you feeling like you’ve lived a full twelve months in the last two, we doubt this post will add to your doom and gloom.
In fact, its purpose is to celebrate! A year ago in March, we introduced Gainsight Essentials, a product offering that boiled down our industry-leading, business-scaling Customer Success (CS) platform into a product package that was easier to buy, easier to implement, and easier to use. That’s a big difference from the “ugly, complex, enterprise-only” name-calling that just isn’t true of the elegant, yet powerful, Gainsight platform that thousands of CS and Revenue teams are applying today.
At the core, our intent with Gainsight Essentials has been to help all companies—from startups to scale-ups and beyond—grow while giving them the tools to put their customer first. We’re proud of what our team, and our partners, have brought to market with Essentials. However, the bigger reason to celebrate is the 170+ customers and the community that has sprung up around Gainsight Essentials this past year.
Gainsight Essentials Customer Have Accelerated Time to Value
Often, when a Customer Success team is early in the maturity curve, they tend to acquire CS tools that require them to make a number of compromises. They may experience limitations on the effectiveness of integrations with critical systems like CRM. Lack of depth in customer health scores can result in false-positive reports of happy customers who unexpectedly churn. Maligned systems and processes with Sales can mean lost opportunities for expansion revenue.
Because Essentials is the same platform applied by enterprise teams, customers are able to apply the power with acute focus where they need it most to build a strong foundation for scale over time. Armed with the O2 Framework to guide their journey, Essentials customers are buying, applying, and growing their use of the platform in all the right ways:
1. Customers implement fast by implementing a focused feature set that will make a quick impact.
2. Essentials customers are buying the platform based on what they need to accomplish today, while understanding they have lots of possibilities about how they can evolve their CS strategy in the future.
3. Each quarter, we launch a new cohort of customers into the Essentials Accelerator which allows them to see first-hand how peers are applying best practices with Gainsight.
4. Our well-known company value, Success For All, shines through Essentials with even the smallest CS teams (including a department of one!) making use of the platform.
Essential Learnings: Putting Essentials Features in Context
We think of Gainsight Essentials as the practitioner’s package. It’s for hands-on and hands-in leaders who are laying the groundwork and keeping their companies oriented toward scale. As such, we’ve been focused on sharing perspectives from those who have come before them by rallying customers and partners to provide details of how they’ve found success with the Gainsight platform.
We’ve rallied partners as well as long-time and repeat customers to help educate early maturity customers and non-customers about their successful use of unique capabilities, such as:
- Considerations for Your First Health scorecard
- Launching Your First Digital-led Segment
- Finding a CSM-friendly Approach to CS Ops
- Creating “Bionic” CSMs and Getting More out of Your Product
- Adjusting Your Strategy Based on Changing Market Conditions
Plus, our Essentials Accelerator members get access to these speakers, as well as other skilled mentors, for deeper one-on-one guidance and advice.
A Glimpse of What’s to Come
We continue to refine the Essentials package and programs based on feedback from our customers, as well as what we’ve seen changing in the market. The platform continues to be optimized for ease-of-use, and our Product team is building new ways for our customers to operate efficiently and profitably, such as apps, integrations, and partner ecosystems available in Gainsight Marketplace.
We’ll also continue to expand on the early success of the Essentials Accelerator. We’re modeling the program with tracks for CS Leaders, CS Ops, and Customer Success Managers (CSMs), so that all user types maximize their impact with the platform.
As our first cohort of members graduates from the Essentials Accelerator, they’ll be armed with a renewed one-page, strategic plan, continued access to peers, mentors, and a pool of Gainsight CSMs with expertise that spans both strategy and technology to ensure they achieve their goal of starting and scaling their business with Gainsight.
Learn More
Understand what priorities your organization should be focused on with the Gainsight Value Creation Plan:
