[San Francisco, CA – April 28, 2020] — Today, Gainsight’s CEO, Nick Mehta, and former COO, Allison Pickens, announced the launch of their new book, The Customer Success Economy: Why Every Aspect Of Your Business Model Needs A Paradigm Shift (Wiley). This book is for leaders who want to gain a competitive advantage in the most relevant and important arena today—customer retention. The Customer Success Economy offers examples and practical advice on how companies can transform functions, leadership roles, responsibilities, and strategies so that the whole company can work together in total service to the customer. The book is available for pre-order or via Kindle today.
In 2016, Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue educated businesses on the necessity of customer success as a strategy and an organizational function. Four years later, customer success has evolved into a philosophy and practice that is infused into every part of a company. In the new book, Mehta and Pickens cover how customer success is practiced throughout an entire organization across various industries.
In today’s economy, deploying traditional competitive strategies, from pricing to technical innovation, is not enough for a business to succeed. If companies want to thrive in the next decade, they must integrate their digital offerings into the proven philosophy and practice of customer success. The Customer Success Economy addresses the challenges of transforming company-wide processes to serve the customer first, including:
- How leaders can deliver more intuitive, easy to adopt product experiences
- How to maximize recurring revenue
- How the entire company can embrace customer retention
- The importance of minimizing churn
“In the past decade, we laid the foundation for customer success, but like most new disciplines, change is imminent,” said Nick Mehta, CEO at Gainsight. “Customer success has since shifted from a job function to a company-wide priority. Today, the number one imperative for every company is retaining customers. Now more than ever, it’s becoming increasingly important to rally the entire organization around customer retention. I hope the real-life examples and advice Allison and I share in this book help businesses adapt and thrive in the current economy and for whatever the future brings.”
“We worked with amazing leaders from Slack, Salesforce, Cisco, ADP, and more to share real-life examples of how companies have generated tremendous outcomes for their customers at scale,” said Allison Pickens, former COO at Gainsight. “We also introduced new frameworks to help executives make the best decisions for their businesses. My hope for this book is that it will empower business leaders to infuse the customer’s perspective throughout their entire organization, leading to strong returns for shareholders and fulfilling careers for employees.”
Industry Endorsements
“Customer success is reshaping the way business is done, and companies that are late to adapt won’t last. Customer Success has been the manifesto of the movement. Nick and Allison take it to the next level. They get it. This is required reading for any business leader.” – J.B. Wood, President and CEO, Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA)
“Nick wrote the playbook on customer success before it was a category. Today, customer success is more than a department: it informs behavior, decisions, and actions. In the early 2000s, your product had to be ten times better than your competition. Today, your customer experience needs to be ten times better. The Customer Success Economy is the playbook for a marketplace in which how you sell is why you win.”- Brian Halligan, CEO and Co-Founder, at HubSpot
“Our first step toward customer success was to focus on helping customers get the benefits they seek from the products we sold. The next step—make it an end-to-end operating system, adopt a customer-in, as opposed to a product-out, perspective. This is the lesson The Customer Success Economy teaches.” – Geoffrey Moore, Author, Crossing the Chasm and Zone to Win
“Leaders in the Customer Success economy have the responsibility to enable their teams, unlocking meaning for employees and delivering the right outcomes and experiences for customers. Nick and Allison lay out a powerful framework for how companies can transform work inside and outside their organizations by focusing on the customer.” – Mathilde Collin, Co-Founder and CEO, at Front
“Nick has the pulse of the customer success movement and with The Customer Success Economy, he and Allison are delivering an actionable strategy to thrive in its evolution.” – Tien Tzuo, CEO and founder of Zuora, and author of SUBSCRIBED: Why the Subscription Model Will be Your Company’s Future – and What to Do About It.
“We see it every day—success defined by the customer experience. Delivering exceptional experience is getting difficult, while customer expectation is soaring. As we continue to design products, market, communicate and connect to our audiences, industry expertise like this is crucial to our strategic thinking.” – Jennifer Tejada, CEO, Pagerduty
About the Authors
Nick Mehta is the CEO of Gainsight, The Customer Success Company. He works with a team of nearly 700 people who together have created the customer success category that’s currently taking over the SaaS business model worldwide. Nick has been named one of the Top SaaS CEOs by the Software Report three years in a row, one of the Top CEOs of 2018 by Comparably, was a finalist for EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year. On top of all that, he was recently rated the #1 CEO in the world (the award committee was just his mom, but the details are irrelevant). He also co-authored Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue, the authoritative book on the field.
Allison Pickens is one of the world’s top experts on the business transformation that accompanies the shift to the cloud, having coached thousands of executives at public companies and startups alike. She is part of the Fortune Most Powerful Women community and was named one of the Top Women in SaaS and Top 50 People in Sales and Business Development. She has served as Chief Operating Officer at Gainsight, an independent board director, an investor at Bain Capital and an angel investor, and a strategy consultant at BCG. Allison’s passion for moral philosophy has made her an advocate for technology that puts humans first. She has a degree in Ethics, Politics, and Economics from Yale and an MBA from Stanford. Allison and her husband love to spend time hiking in the woods, deep in conversation about climate change, the gut biome, affordable housing, or a recent podcast they listened to.
About Gainsight: Gainsight’s innovative customer-centric technology is driving the future of customer success. The company’s Customer Cloud offers a powerful set of solutions focused on customer success, product experience, revenue optimization, and customer data, that together enable businesses to put the customer at the center of everything they do. Companies that use Gainsight grow net retention by up to 33 percent. Learn how leading companies like Okta, SAP Concur, and Box use Gainsight at www.gainsight.com.
Press Contact: press@gainsight.com
