Have you ever called a customer and been asked a question that caught you off guard? Has any customer issue or opportunity surprised you recently? At Gainsight, we dislike such surprises. In fact, we dislike them so much that we have designed Gainsight to ensure that you never get blindsided by any of them.
As a sales & account management professional, you need to identify optimal upsell and cross-sell targets, manage renewals, gather references and prepare for meetings efficiently. Gainsight for Sales can help you achieve these objectives right from the Account and the Opportunity page in Salesforce with access to rich customer data and built-in intelligent workflow.
But before we go any further on this topic, it’s important to make the distinction between the two separate functions within a sales org: farming – tasked with growing and nurturing existing accounts – and hunting – tasked with acquiring new customer logos. We have broken down this post into two sections to show how Gainsight caters to both of these sales functions.
Gainsight for Growing Existing Accounts
Sales professionals responsible for nurturing/growing existing customers can accomplish the following objectives with Gainsight:
Get an accurate and comprehensive view of your customer:
Your business has a wealth of data on its customers — more so than ever before. But for this data to be useful, it must be conveniently accessible to you every time you need it. To prep for an upsell conversation, for example, you should not be chasing other teams for details on customer’s adoption and health trends, purchase history, outstanding support issues, account plans and firmographic details. Your Gainsight Sales view is a single source of truth that can bring these silos of customer data together into one place.
Gainsight’s Summary View: Spend more time selling instead of data scraping
Purchase History: Timeline format to represent purchase history and trends
Get notified when a sponsor moves:
A loss of executive sponsor is one of the leading indicators of customer churn. This risk is often unexpected, making it difficult to be proactive around it. Your executive sponsor or adoption champion could leave anytime during the customer lifecycle. Sponsor Tracking allows you to monitor any changes to the title, location or company of the executive sponsor and then notifies you if there is a change, via a Call To Action.
The bright side to this risk is that the outgoing Executive Sponsor could be a great lead in her new role and organization. One of the steps that our Sales reps execute in their playbooks is to reach out to our erstwhile champion/sponsor in their new role or organization to find out if their new team is looking for solutions such as ours. Our champions can help us get introduced to the team and decision makers there, potentially creating an opportunity to sell our solution to this new company.
An Example of Sponsor Tracking: Our executive’s sponsor movement is a cause of concern for us, but it has also potentially opened up a new opportunity for us in eBay.
Manage and expand Account relationships:
To maximize your success in strategic accounts, there are three key essential customer engagement goals you should try to achieve:
- Track and nurture deeper relationships– Gainsight’s Relationships enables you to manage your relationship with your customer not just at an account level but at a granularity most pertinent to you such as at a geographical, departmental, product or use case level. Just as the Opportunity object in Salesforce captures potential business relationship, our Relationship object captures ongoing business relationship. If you want to learn more about Relationships, this blog post by Karl, our VP of Products is an excellent resource.
- Engage with the decision maker and measure success– With Gainsight Success Plans, you can track the business outcomes that customers look to achieve with your products or services and create a system of record to collaborate with other teams and your customers towards plan achievement.
- Identify white-space opportunities – Knowing how customers are using your product and how they feel about their experience therein, among myriad other data points, allows appropriate cross-sells and up-sell opportunities to surface. Gainsight allows you to discover that white-space around customer behavior and engagement necessary to grow an account. For example, if your customer has opened many high-priority, low severity tickets recently, they may be looking for a better than standard resolution time and are thus an excellent use case to start the conversation on (up)selling them your premium support offering.
Gainsight for Driving New Business
If you are responsible for driving new business and expansion in your organization , here is how the Gainsight Sales view could help you:
Use survey and engagement data to identify references for your next deal:
Gainsight’s data on customer’s product usage, activity, survey responses, and overall sentiment can provide specific insights into which customers could best serve as a sales reference. For example, a customer who has given a great survey score recently is much more likely to serve as your reference. Gainsight provides a closed loop workflow from its Survey functionality ensuring that the Sales Executive is notified to take specific action on a survey score. Gainsight’s integration with Boulder Logic further allows you to view and track reference activity.
Gainsight Survey Data: An easy way to track customer responses over time
Research use case for potential customers:
Since you have made it this far into this admittedly long blog post, we’ll let you in on a little secret.
Consider this – you have an early morning last-minute sales call scheduled with an ad-tech company. Ad-tech may not be your typical use case but you know that you have few customers in this space.
The Gainsight view of your present ad-tech customers is an excellent source of how similar companies can find your solution useful. An existing customer’s business case – their usage metrics trend and interaction with your team, their in-context project plans and specific goals could serve as a goldmine to deliver an effective demo and sales pitch that resonates with the business case of a prospect. Wouldn’t it be great to talk about how other customers in the similar space have been using your product? Luckily for you, Gainsight provide this data right at your fingertips.
Gainsight’s History Section: Learn how your existing customers of a segment use your product to make relevant sales conversations with your prospects
Success Plans: Gainsight’s Success Plans are a window to the world of your customers, empowering you to have contextual conversations with your prospective customers
Value-based selling is not a new concept. However, for it to work effectively, Sales teams should have the right tools to research and demonstrate quantifiable value to their customers. Gainsight for Sales helps sales and account team broaden and deepen their pipeline by providing the most pertinent information at the right stage in the sales cycle. Teams that help their customers make good business decisions by understanding their use case, underlying needs and desired outcomes will always have a competitive advantage. Welcome to Selling 2.0.
