Wow! What a record-breaking Pulse Everywhere! Over 22,000 registrations across two days, over 25 companies presenting, and over 50 states/countries logged on live. We couldn’t have done it without you—our Pulse community. We know that, like us, most of you are in fuller houses right now, so we decided to enjoy a spoof of our old favorite—Full House. After all, most of us are in full houses right now. Be sure to catch the replay of our Gainsight Full House here if you missed it and if you missed day 1, our recap is here.
Our CEO, Nick Mehta, kicked off day 2 with an opening keynote featuring Mapbox, VTS Intellishift, Adobe, PTC, and Docusign. These game-changing speakers shed light on how they are using Gainsight to structure their Customer Success organizations, use data to drive processes, solve customer problems, and deliver results for their customers. Lorna Henri at Mapbox shared how responsive clients were to a simple act of kindness through an automated, personalized Gainsight powered email. PTC talked us through customer success transformation as a marathon to win the race against churn. Kristi Faltorusso, a four-time Gainsight customer, put it simply, Gainsight equals problems solved with health scores, product adoption data, CTAs, and journey mapping all in one place. Jared Lees of Adobe shared how he brings the product and customer success teams together.
Let’s dig into our top 10 takeaways from Day 2. As a reminder, all of these sessions can be accessed on-demand here.
- Jill Favro Sawatzky (VP, Head of Customer Advocacy & Success) at Commvault is a four-time Gainsight customer. If there is anyone who can speak about Gainsight across a small, medium or enterprise organization, its Jill, who has implemented or used Gainsight at IBM, Citrix, and PROS. Jill, an avid biker, shared a touching story about her time in Paris last year attempting to recreate aspects of The Tour de France. First is planning your ride, so in the case of Gainsight, it is determining your data structure early. Next up is reviewing your map, for which you can use Gainsight’s Success Plans to guide you to victory. While on the journey, employ road tricks, or in the case of Gainsight, use Timelime and CTA’s to gain efficiencies and scale. Lastly, brag about the ride— use Gainsight to tell the customer story and level up your data rather than let it be static. We’re so thankful Jill continues to come back to Gainsight on every CS journey.
- The Glint by Linkedin team, including Mary Poppen (CCO), Stephanie Gerpe (Head of NA CS), Valery Skvirskaya (CS Operations Manager), and Thuy Koo (Manager, CS Operations), made their session Harry Potter-themed. They shared how Glint is using journey mapping, success plans, and playbooks to craft wizardry around Customer Success. By pulling all their data into Gainsight for visibility while leveling up their automated digital outreaches with relevant content, they have seen amazing results. They’ve achieved a 40 point increase in NPS scores with smaller segment accounts (on par with an NPS similar to B2C organizations) and a 50% efficiency improvement using pooled resources allowing customers to engage with each other.
- Another presenter who shared best practices on a pooled model is Matt Bielak (Sr Manager and CS Service Owner) and Scott Trimmer (Sr Mgr of IT Global Business Services) from PTC. As a company with a number of products, they have a goal of increasing customer success support for up to 12 products instead of the 2-8 products today. Customer Support is a revenue-generating service for them, so in these times, leaning into this translates into additive revenue. They built a solution where customers receive a one size fits all level of high quality, low touch service for the first 90 days, and afterward their needs are met through a pooled resource. With Gainsight’s CTAs and Dashboard, their CSMs can immediately see where to take action.
- If you thought Customer Success technology was just for CS professionals, think again! Phil Pergola (Sr Director of CS) at VMWare shared a tale of how is driving results using Gainsight for his partnership channel, which accounts for 30% of VMWare revenue. In times like this, a go-to-market strategy that aligns with the right strategic partners is a win for business and a win for your customers. Part of Phil’s strategy at VMWare was to extend the same segmentation and swarming strategy to partners like others do accounts—by creating onboarding playbooks, partner health scores, and using professional services collateral in the journey orchestration. The results speak for themselves with a less than 3% partner churn rate and over 145% net revenue retention.
- One of our most targeted products to combat churn is our Revenue Optimization product and our very own team Minh Phan (Sr Dir Product Management), Nitisha Rathi (Principal PM) and Aditya Marla (Principal PM) took the innovation track by storm to “Show You The Money”! With our Gainsight Horizon announcement yesterday, there are so many features coming to our RO product including data science usage to predict churn, surfacing renewals that need attention, and better integrations with other systems to allow users to pull in data from anywhere. If churn is top of mind today, which it is for most, our RO product is one to add to your toolbox to maintain through this impending downturn.
- We already know how much better together CS and PM leaders are, but Stephanie Berner (Global Head of CS) and Bo Sun (Global Head of CS Strategy and Ops) took us through a chat to remind us how vital CS and CS Ops are as a unified front. At Linkedin Sales Solutions, this dynamic duo has been on a three-year journey to establish CS ops as a strategic asset. This will allow Linkedin to have more proactive and predictive customer experience and scale it across the global sales organization. Stephanie and Bo are clear that this does not have to be a three-year process for all. By using the three building blocks of strategy, operations, and systems you can deliver CS as a center of excellence in three months or three years.
- Gainsters have recently had the opportunity to experience the power of Seismic as we launched them as our internal source of truth for assets. Al Bsharah (VP, Product Operations) and Lauren Stefano (Director, Customer Marketing) discussed with viewers how they use Gainsight PX to drive new feature adoption. First, they ensure all relevant page views and button clicks are mapped in Gainsight, so regardless of your role, the product team can provide valuable insights. Then they use these metrics to determine a baseline and set goals for adoption increases. By collecting insights from the vantage of CS, PMM, and PM, they are able to better gauge what success looks like for new features and identify future roadmap iterations.
- NPS scores are one of the key indicators for customer health. Issac Vaughn and Sara Trott of Zenefits shared how they are using NPS feedback to share insights with the C-suite. By zeroing in on the time frame between the first NPS survey and the renewal stage, they are able to address feedback to have a positive impact on churn. They manage their high touch and tech touch communications during this critical time with Gainsight journey orchestrator. By listening to feedback from NPS surveys within Gainsight, they are able to also prioritize surveys with phrases like COVID during this time to also show customers they are responsive during this critical time.
- In times like today, we can all use a quick win, and Rosa Gandler (Senior Ops Mgr, CS) and Calvin Multanen (Ops Mgr, CS) from Greenhouse share how they successfully did that by switching to Gainsight. For those of you on the fence, maybe for fear of a difficult transition, this is the session to go back and watch on-demand. The key catalyst for Greenhouse having a smooth transition was its Gainsight Advisory Board. This cross-functional unit determined the best CTAs for daily workflows, met regularly to dive deeper into dashboards and customer values, as well as used child-like joy such as Gainsight bingo to see the technology from adoption to success. Today they use an intake form, powered by Monday, with the goal of implementing all new projects within Gainsight to continue scaling the tool for success.
- Our closing keynote featured speakers from Salesforce, Cisco, IBM, and Tableau. This is just a sample of many of the leading enterprise organizations in technology today all relying on Gainsight in various ways to power through this pandemic. The common theme among all these leaders is how much they see now more than ever the power of Customer Success through these times to support each other, our community and our customers. Bill Patterson, EVP and GM of CRM Applications at Salesforce summed it up perfectly “I could not be more excited to be your partner and your friend.”
That wraps up an amazing Day 2. We hope you were able to watch some of these highlights in action. We are so appreciative of all the feedback on social media and through your account relationships at Gainsight. Please take these learnings back to ‘work’ to support the Customer Success and Product communities so we can get through this ‘Together’. We hope to see you again next year, in person, at Moscone!
