LeanIX Drives Expansion in a Multi-Product Ecosystem

Enterprise architecture management company LeanIX had evolved from a single product to a multi-product platform. As a result, their Customer Success team needed to be able to evaluate customer health based on a complex web of product-and-customer relationships, and also identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities. Using Gainsight, LeanIX built a Digital Customer Success system that could track value in the context of a multi-product ecosystem, using predictive analytics and workflows to identify cross-sell expansion opportunities and maintain customer health.

LeanIX helps their customers organize, plan, and manage IT landscapes with an automated, data-driven approach. The company began in 2012 with a single product for enterprise architecture management. As their business grew, their product portfolio expanded, evolving into a true platform offering.

For LeanIX’s Customer Success team, the shift to a multi-product environment posed several challenges. Customer Success Managers (CSMs) now had to manage a complex ecosystem of products and customers within each account.

“We started looking for a CS solution back in 2018 when we were only approx. 8 CSMs and had just crossed the 100 customers mark. Seeing our growth trajectory we realized fast that we cannot scale Customer Success by just adding more CSMs. We needed a way to gain insight into our customer portfolio, start standardizing CSM tasks and reduce manual efforts for customers and CSMs where possible,” says Christian Richter, Chief Customer Officer at LeanIX.

At first, they tried simply tracking the same metrics for each additional product, using multiple dashboards and reports. But this approach inundated the CSMs with data, and it didn’t provide a holistic view of the health for each account. It also made standardization and replication of processes virtually impossible.

“To be able to scale, it’s essential that CSMs don’t have to go through three different dashboards and five different reports to determine how they can help a customer,” explains Anita Beck, Head of Customer Success Operations at LeanIX.
In addition to tracking customer health, CSMs needed an easy way to identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities, and be able to communicate that information to the Account team, who were responsible for driving and closing opportunities.

To solve these multi-product challenges, LeanIX turned to Gainsight for three reasons: its thought leadership and technical knowledge, Customer Success community, and sales experience that could address LeanIX’s uses cases.

From a technical perspective, Gainsight’s Relationships, which is a framework within Gainsight CS that enables customer success organizations to accurately model and manage complex customer structures was the remedy to manage its multi-product challenges. Multi-product companies like LeanIX often have multiple customers within a single company, who are in turn using multiple products managed by different Sales or Customer Success teams. Gainsight Relationships allows customer success organizations to track the health of each connection point, as well as understand how they ladder up to the bigger picture.

LeanIX’s CSMs use different reports and dashboards to track stakeholders separately for each product.

They also added the capability for CSMs to track cross-sells directly in Gainsight Timeline, which is the official record of customer interactions within the Gainsight platform. Timeline enables Gainsight users to quickly gather insights and drive actions over the course of a customer’s life cycle.

Now, CSMs can indicate cross-sell and upsell opportunities right alongside call records, external and internal participant lists, and other account information.

And rather than CSMs having to track the opportunity on the customer’s Timeline as a milestone, it’s tracked automatically, which makes it transparent for everyone at the company.

As a result of working with Gainsight Relationships, LeanIX has developed a data-driven process for measuring customer health and identifying opportunities to cross-sell. Gainsight has improved collaboration between Customer Success and Sales. The YoY existing business pipeline increased by 80% and YoY existing business bookings increased by 75%.

Because the system is easy-to-use and transparent, CSMs understand the “why” of the analysis they are doing. And the flexibility of Gainsight allows them to use an iterative approach, easily pivoting as customer needs change.