1. Tell us a bit about yourself and what your role is at Gainsight.
I’m the Customer Account Manager for Gainsight EMEA’s customer base, working from our London office with our small but growing and vibrant team.
I stumbled into London from Melbourne, Australia, over three years ago but only really felt at home when I found the fast-paced, dynamic tech industry at Gainsight 1.5 years later.
What does an Account Management role at Gainsight mean?
We know that renewal and customer expansion ownership is different for every organisation. It’s one of the most widely debated and discussed topics amongst our customers and the industry.
As an Account Manager at Gainsight, I manage the commercial aspect of the relationship with our customer base in EMEA. I drive successful renewals and encourage customer growth and expansion. I support their market maturity by exploring new and additional use cases with Gainsight to advance their business goals.
2. Share what your day-to-day is like?
I have a relatively robust portfolio of customers, so a significant portion of my day is spent with them discussing:
- Strategic support and planning discussions
- Upcoming renewal catch-ups
- EBR’s with the COM (Customer Outcomes Manager or CSM)
- New product discovery and qualification
- Product pitch and demonstration with an SC (Solutions Consultant)
There are countless plates to spin as an Account Manager, so organisation and being thorough are imperative. If I’m not sharing best practices or strategising with a customer, I’m building a business case with my champion so they can gain the budget for a new product. I could be negotiating the terms of a renewal agreement with executives or working with the COM team to build out a customer success plan. All of this while holding an expansion revenue target.
If there’s one thing I’ve learnt, it’s the importance of relevance and timing.
Both are key in this role, and that means account base analysis and planning is crucial. I spend hours in Gainsight every week gathering customer insight to understand where I should prioritise my time and actions. I work closely with the COM team, and using Gainsight allows us to manage accounts and drive success for our customers together cross-functionally.
3. At Gainsight, we believe customer success is a company-wide priority. How do you drive customer success in your role?
As a CAM, there is an opportunity to learn from your customers. Learn deeply about their goals, what they are trying to achieve, and the challenges that are in their way. Every customer and every organization is different, and there is no one solution to solving their challenges or helping them reach their Customer Success goals. It’s one thing to learn but to put this into action and deliver on outcomes is the critical part many people miss.
Customer Success is a company-wide commitment. Therefore, it’s up to everyone at Gainsight to drive success. In my role specifically, being part of “the post-sales front-line” means that it’s my responsibility to connect my customers with as many brains and resources as possible and as much as required to help them make the educated decisions they need to.
I may not have all the answers, but I have access to the people who do! Educating my customers and leveraging the wealth of industry knowledge within Gainsight allows me to help my customers deliver on the strategy that initially led them to invest in Gainsight.
4. Do you use the Gainsight platform to do your job? If so, how?
There are so many different parts to this, the overarching value driver being that, in all aspects, Gainsight encourages efficient collaboration between CAM’s (Customer Account Managers) and COM’s. Why is this important? It creates a vital connection between customer health and revenue dollars.
I can take the context of already collected and stored customer data in Gainsight and apply it to every connection point I have with my account base.
I review customer Scorecards and account history within Timeline before important customer touchpoints adding credibility and meaning to my conversations and ensure I record all meeting notes and customer emails in Timeline with our Gmail Assist.
I get notified of CSQL’s (Customer Success Qualified Leads) in Cockpit through CTA’s as well as an automated Renewal CTA 120 days in advance of an upcoming renewal with a standardized playbook, and email assist increasing my efficiency. Dashboards help me understand deployment and usage statistics, so I know when a customer is prime for license expansion.
I use Company Intelligence to keep track of relevant news and updates about my portfolio in Slack. This is a prime example of Gainsight supporting relevance and timing. It cuts out the noise and has proven incredibly successful in identifying opportunities for expansion from rounds of funding or exec changes that I otherwise may have missed.
Last but not least—Renewals Centre is the Holy Grail for me. I have somewhere between 20 and 30 renewal or expansion opportunities to manage every quarter, which I do in Renewals Centre. I can inline edit all of my opportunity fields weekly from one area with bi-directional sync back to SFDC. Renewals Centre also uses data science and machine learning to predict the likelihood of renewal across my account base, which helps me quickly understand my gap to plan and where revenue dollars are at risk.
5. Childlike joy is one of Gainsight’s values. Share a fun fact about yourself or your go-to karaoke song?
Gainsight cultivates a very rare and tremendously talented school of Karaoke performers for which I am not one.
I have a University major in Mathematical Modelling, which tends to surprise most people due to my complete lack of flair for quick maths.
However, keeping within the musical talent theme, in High School, despite the smirks about my shining multicoloured band tie collection, I reveled in playing the trumpet for a solid five years.
There was the Junior Band, Stage Band, Symphonic Band, and Groove Train, all of which quelled my musical appetite. This involved very early mornings for band rehearsals, Music Camp, School Music Festivals, and my trumpet’s transportation to and from school on the bus every day. Before anyone asks – I do not have any photos.
6. What’s your favorite thing about working at Gainsight?
I will never take for granted the openness and transparency of senior leadership and management at Gainsight.
I have learnt so much in my time here. There is something new to learn every day from every single employee. I’ve learnt from clever, driven, and talented colleagues who truly believe in a driving movement as a collective. I’ve also learnt from the legacy brains of Gainsight, who are always so generous with their time and willing to be a rich source of knowledge, making themselves available as an additional sounding board in any scenario.
Gainsight allows you to work with natural, galvanizing leaders, teaching you not only life-long skills but an understanding of the building blocks required to create a truly successful business inside and out.
