At times it can feel like Sales and Post-Sales teams have nothing in common. But there’s one thing that both sides of the house can always agree on: they hate surprises.
If you’re a Sales rep that has been working to sell a prospect for six months only for them to vanish off the face of the Earth, you’re going to be left wondering what happened. If you’re a Customer Success Manager (CSM) responsible for a long-term account that has been nothing but successful and showing great customer health only to one day get an unexpected churn notice, you’re going to be left wondering what happened. Then you find out. The company was acquired, your champion left, a new executive was hired and wanted to go in a new direction, or any of a number of huge events that can seriously alter the relationship you’ve worked so hard to create.
Wouldn’t it be great to know about these kinds of milestones before they manifest in the form of a lost deal or churn notice? Or on the flip side, wouldn’t it be great to know that the prospect you think would be a great fit for your product just raised a new round of funding and might have that ever-elusive budget to make a deal? Maybe your customer just announced a major expansion of their product line that creates opportunities to help them grow and expand their product usage?
The harsh reality is in 2020, it won’t just be “great.” It could very well be the difference between making or missing your revenue goals.
Enter: Company Intelligence.
Identify ready-to-purchase accounts with buying signals
One of the most important factors in any software purchase is timing. You might have the best product in the world, be priced under the competition, and make total sense for a company to buy—but the timing just isn’t right. Sometimes all you can do is sit back and wait for the prospect to be ready—but you could be alerted the moment they are ready? Imagine juggling hundreds of accounts where you’re sitting idly by, waiting for the timing to be right, and hoping you don’t miss the window of opportunity because you’re busy focusing on other accounts.
With Gainsight’s Company Intelligence tool, the hard work is done for you. With an ear to the ground, Gainsight listens to publicly available sources like press releases, news articles, earnings calls, and more. The end result? You’ll know the second that acquisition was completed that forced your prospect to stall for the past six months. It’ll even tell you when that small startup you hadn’t given any thought to announced they’re hiring 500 people in the next six months.
Timing is everything. And with Company Intelligence, you’ll never be on the wrong side of it again.
Be proactive with big events at your customers
Timing can be just as important when your goal is to keep existing customers happy. Better outcomes for your customers means less churn, and it means more expansion opportunities, which means more revenue for your business. But even the best customer success teams can’t monitor everything going on with their customers. Sure, you’re collecting product usage, running regular surveys, and having quarterly business reviews, but what about executive shakeups, sponsor changes, and major positioning changes?
There’s a reason that CSMs ask if your business objectives have changed every time you chat—it’s because they don’t know, and it’s massively important to know. And sure, you could do a quick Google search right before the call, but that’s not exactly proactive, nor is it very scalable. That’s where Company Intelligence comes to the rescue! Not only does it find that information for you, it delivers it right to you via Slack.
And on top of that, Company Intelligence gives you the ability to act on the information by creating a CTA or posting it to Timeline right from Slack. Instead of waiting three weeks to find out about that big business change in your customer account, now it’s delivered right to you and you’re acting on it in minutes.
Use Company Intelligence with the rest of the Gainsight Customer Cloud, and you’ve gone from being days or weeks behind the eight ball and spending hours of your day on research to prep for a meeting to being incredibly well-informed and able to act on the data at scale.
Surprises stink. Stay informed on your customers and prospects without lifting a finger
Whether you’re in Sales or Post-Sales, a surprise is the last thing you want. No one has ever been excited about a surprise churn, or a surprise miss on your sales forecast. But for the most part, surprises are part of the job. Unless you’ve got a stash of the spice Melange (shout out to Dune fans), there’s just no way to stay on top of all the news with all your customers and potential customers. Maybe if you have an army of Sardaukar (double Dune reference!) you can spend hours researching, cataloging, and evaluating what requires follow-up. But short of that, you’re out of luck. Unless you have Gainsight Company Intelligence.
So what are you waiting for? Stop driving with the parking brake on and take a look at Company Intelligence today.
