Name: Customer success-driven expansion your business can’t ignore
Uploaded: 2025-05-13T18:30:51.339Z
Duration: 1 h
Description: Customer success-driven expansion your business can’t ignore

Transcript for "Customer success-driven expansion your business can’t ignore": As well as Roman, the vice president of customer success at Gainsight. Without further ado, I'm gonna hand over to them, and thank you so much to everybody who's joining us today. Thanks. Hello, everybody. My name is Roman Dalichow. As Nicole just introduced me, I'm the VP of customer success at Gainsight. I've been in customer success for about ten years working at companies like LinkedIn, Procore, SalesLoft before finding Gainsight, and I just joined the Gainsight team about two months ago. So I'm excited to talk a little bit about expansion with you. But before we do, I wanna introduce you to Carson. Hi, everybody. Thank you all for dialing in today. As Roman said, my name is Carson Stones. I'm the senior manager of customer success at data.world. I too have a little over ten years of core CS experience. I've worked in financial services at GLG. I worked in tech at Informatica, and then I jumped into the startup world with data.world when they were in their series b. I've been here for the last four years, and it's been quite the journey. So we're looking forward to today's, discussion and, really look forward to hearing your questions and answers at the end as well as what comes through the chat today so that we can, you know, gather your feedback and share best practices. I think we also have a very hot topic that hopefully a lot of people are interested in. But before we get to it, we wanna do a little bit of an icebreaker, and we are very interested in seeing what are you reading right now. And I'll start, and then, Carson, I'm interested to hear what you're reading. I'm actually reading going back to an American classic, and I'm reading Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. I've read this book several times before, and I try to reread it about every five years just because I I like it a lot. That's great. I love classics. So I have a problem. I'm a compulsive multi book reader, usually different genres. So my main book right now is, it's called When the Clock Broke. It's about American political scene in the early nineteen nineties. Characters such as Ross Perot, George h w Bush, Rush Limbaugh. Many of y'all may remember this cast of characters. To lighten things up, I also sit outside because it's spring, and I have a book of, poetry by Emily Dickinson, which is like a nice palate cleanser after after the deep history. Alright. What about you all? I'm interested to see what what our audience is reading these days. Any soon. That one is definitely on my high priority list. Let them I think for CS, that's an extremely good mindset to start practicing intentionally. I'd love to learn a little bit. I'm not gonna write down unreasonable hospitality just because that name seems really compelling. I did read a Jane Austen recently. I have not read Persuasion, but I finally tackled Pride and Prejudice, and it was fantastic. It was way better than I expected. The War of Art. I I like that little pun on the original. Game of Thrones, Atomic Habits, all all good books. Or do you say that? Should we jump in? Yes. We should. But we clearly have a lot of readers in the chat today. I love that. Love that. Alright. Why don't why don't we why don't we kick off today? And we're we're gonna start, by taking maybe a step back from the the lens of what the bulk of today's topic is gonna be. And as I've, you know, navigated my CS career and talked to peers and certainly here at Gainsight, some of our customers, there's a lot of talk about what moving from CSM one point o to CSM two point o looks like. The reality is that we're in the midst of that movement today already. And, effectively, what I'm hearing from customers is that our organizations and our teams need to think differently about collaboration, how we work more effectively together, and how we have less overlap in our go to market motions. That means that swim lanes need to be clearly defined and getting really focused on meeting customer expectations as we have increasing demand in the markets to bring products to them, to our customers. I think on top of that, enterprise software isn't getting any easier to adopt. Right? I think, there probably be if I could see people, like, a lot of head noddings around, a lot more headwinds relative to tech stack, consolidation, and CFO is really questioning the value of products that are being purchased by their teams. And the reality is today, what that means for customer success is that often CSMs are being asked to kind of be everything for everybody. Right? There's there's clear defined swim lanes around what sales is asked to do, retire quota, marketing, help develop pipeline. But customer success is still kind of that catch all role that we need to figure out where our role as leaders is to help demystify that a little bit. And our objective, in my opinion, is quite simple. We need to be very clear with our teams on what they need to deliver to make customers successful and meet our internal growth goals. And part of that is reducing the noise and becoming laser focused on commercial outcomes that help build advocacy and really help create new capabilities across our entire customer base. And, Carson, I know that you have a point of view on a couple things that CSMs need to do in practice. Absolutely. And here's the good news for everybody. The actual job of CSM ing, and this is something I grappled with quite a bit when I took over this role at data.world. You're at a start up. You're managing a team. It's very easy for CS to be everything to everybody, support, solution, sales, etcetera. You will fail if you take that approach. So we went back to basics, and we said, what is the actual job of CSM? And the good news is, it's not different than it has been from the very beginning. Driving strategy and outcomes for customers. Quite simply, is your team working with each customer to capture business goals in a joint success plan and then driving those tasks to verified outcomes. That's that's CSM ing one zero one. If you don't wanna do that, this is not the career for you. But if you love doing that, then let's talk. Because, after that is adoption performance. Right? Like, it's not enough to just document the progress and the goals. You have to actually make sure that they're utilizing the products and services that they paid for. That's more art than science in my experience, and it requires a really talented, well enabled team to drive both. Okay. Yes. You fulfilled every seat and license that you purchased, but are those bringing value? Are those actually serving the high level goals as stated in your success plan? Stakeholder alignment. Okay. You have a cadence call. You're friends with the person you've been meeting with every week for years. You know about their kids and their pets. But do y'all talk about strategic things? Do you bring them new product information? Do you talk to them about products and services they don't own today? That stakeholder alignment is absolutely essential. Like, are you meeting with the right people at the right cadence with the right content? That is extremely important, and it can be measured. And you can also measure the output of that too. So what is the output? If you're doing those three things, what should you expect? Well, better risk management first and foremost. So, I'll start with the negative and then I'll get into the growth and the positive. Risk management is seen inherently as negative, but honestly, it's it's always there you can always find a risk if you look hard enough. So the important thing is to determine what are the real risks. What are the things that actually could impact your bottom line revenue? Lack of engagements, poor support sentiment, loss champion, and what is just noise? In a similar thread, advocacy and expansion follow a very similar model, but in the other direction. So once you have successfully landed the first four, of the this five part mandate, Expansion and advocacy is the reward for doing a job well, for actually mapping all of this and driving outcomes with customers. So from my perspective, that's how we've mapped it, and the purpose of today's call is to really get into that fifth one. So, Roman, do you wanna elaborate on why we chose that to focus on for today? Yeah. I I do. And I wanna give kind of, like, everybody a peek a little peek under the hood on some of the things that we're working on, like, insight around some of these topics too. One of the things before I slip to the next slide is I love what you said on the stakeholder alignment piece, and it reminded me what I what I learned in a previous role about it being very important for CSMs to have productive conversations with customers versus pleasant conversations with customers. My team and I, we just actually underwent an exercise, based on Patrick Lencioni's five dysfunctions of a team, and being able to make sure that you're having a healthy level of conflict with your customers is good. Because then you're understanding and really getting to the root of what causes are, and that also, like, really helps build that trust and drive results. So I love that you said that. And so as I mentioned earlier, I wanna kinda give everybody a little bit of a peek as to, like, me as a CS leader, how I'm working across the categories that Carson Stones just described, here with my team at Gainsight. So just for, comparison purposes, we're about a 250,000,000 ARR, multi product organization working with customers across the globe. And so all of these categories are tremendously important for us. And one of the things that, as I mentioned earlier, I think is the responsibility of a good leadership team is being able to provide clarity to teams on how the metrics and their behavior towards engaging with customers on the job description actually drive the outputs that are important for the business. So metrics also help managers and their teams prioritize where they wanna focus time and energy, where we can get involved with uncovering opportunity to bring in cross functional partners. There's a whole slew of important activities that are kicked off by being aligned on what you want to measure. And so if we focus on the positive side and the topic of today's, agenda, that's the advocacy and the expansion piece. And while there are other metrics that you could bundle into this package, I chose I chose four that stand out to me as being very compelling and succinct. The first is probably the most basic and the one that everybody's kind of either building into your performance management structure or have a stick around, and that's the CSQL, the CS qualified lead. Right? That's the act of actually creating pipeline, which sales loves. Right? It closes quickly. It's considered very rich pipeline because, you also need less pipe coverage to have ARR that comes out of that activity. Next is the product road map. Right? That's more than just showing customers what's coming. In my opinion and my experience, customers always wanna know what our other customers are doing and what's cool and what products they're taking advantage of that they might not be. So that's very much part of the CSM's responsibility, in my opinion, to talk to customers, benchmarking them against customers of like size, etcetera, but then also pulling back and giving a sneak peek to the cool things that we're working on and getting ready to bring to market in future quarters. That's a very awesome opportunity for CSMs to have that conversation and open the dialogue around challenges and opening the aperture to what's possible in terms of driving the verified outcomes that Carson Stones mentioned earlier. Next is realizing where white space plays a really important part in understanding how to be proactive in your CSMs managing their book of business relative to expansion. I can't understate this enough, but having CSMs have a commercial point of view around their book of business, understanding which products have which customers have which products attached, and then building a strategy on how we plan to engage internally and externally to get the customer to a better place, in our, opinion, having more of our products because we we feel that's where we can deliver max value to our customers. And then finally is kind of like the I would say this is the oil that fuels the engine, and that's the professional services elements of it. And some of y'all's businesses that might also include a partner ecosystem, third party, that help drive the adoption of your tools. But this is really a secret fuel to really boost up and get your customers to value much faster. Think about this in terms of more automation, better workflows, as well as just overall better adoption across your your user base. And like I said, it's a real accelerator that is really important for customers to realize is essential for adopting your your products. And so in summary, having the important, metrics to track performance is important, number one, and then you can align with your with your managers and how you go to market with your CS strategy on the right behaviors that you want CSMs to fulfill what the job needs them to do as number two, and that should lead to your business growth. And that kinda brings us to this next point that retention and expansion, just as sales and customer success, they're really interlocked. Right? I think we generally tend to view these as bifurcated teams and outcomes, but the organizations that really have the most effective customer life cycle strategies are the ones that work really well internally and focus on customer outcomes. I find it really interesting that between 6070% of b to b revenue comes from expanding existing customers. Right? Like, there's a lot of energy and focus put on bringing in those big new logos. The reality is that those are harder to come by. They are generally more expensive to acquire, and they are less predictable leading up to their first renewal because it's their first renewal. I think when I think about what the the the graph and the metrics that we see on screen here, also an interesting, trend that we're seeing over the three separate years, twenty twenty two, twenty twenty three, twenty twenty four, where we surveyed CCOs, Gainsight customers around what are the most important metrics that you're holding your team accountable for. You'll notice that the only one that has consistent year on year growth across each survey is customer retention. And so, specifically, what that's referring to is within a defined period of time, whether it's a quarter, a half, or a fiscal year, how much revenue do you have up for renewal and what percentage of that are you renewing? So it's your renewal rate related to your existing customers. I think this is really interesting to think about because we look at the first principles of the CSM role. It's to to to keep your customers to maximize lifetime value, and we'll talk a little bit about the long tail of the relationship in a bit. But very tactically, it's important that you keep your customers so you have an opportunity to sell into them later. And I think that is, a really critical role as we think about growth and the CSM's role as part of growth. It's not only uncovering the CSQLs. It's providing the future opportunity for you to expand with your customer. And I would say, finally, there's also the components that you'll see here that are a little bit surprising to some where we see things like expansion revenue or net expansion rate dipping down a little bit, but that, I think, makes sense in the context that the focus is on retaining your base as a top priority. And and, Carson, I see you nodding. I'm curious if there's anything that you wanna add or any context. Yeah. And I assume we're preaching to the choir here because candidly, we have felt personally the heightened attention on customer retention. Like, that is absolutely where the spotlight is at right now for our business. So we're probably part of that, you know, 76% number. I will say that look, GRR, NRR expansion, forecasted churn, like, these are still fundamental business indicators. But that core question, are you retaining your existing customers? It really answers all of the questions because you can sit there and say our churn rate's low and our expansion is high, but your retention is 50%. Like, it just I've seen I've seen the gains that can be played with these numbers and you can't hide customer retention. Like, it is it it it reveals all. And so I think that's why it's it reigns supreme. It's it's a very elegant measure for everything else. Yeah. And we had a we have actually a question also to the the kind of the topic of CSQLs as well as current investment, and specifically, how like, how do you ensure that we're setting good strategies that make sure that CSMs don't lose sight of helping customers successful in, like, in their current deployment as opposed to pitching CSQLs. And we'll talk about that a little bit more later, but I think my point of view on it and, Carson Stones, be curious to see see yours is that one, we should absolutely make customers successful within their deployments and their use cases that they signed up for whatever your product can deliver to them today. That should be priority number one. But then very similar to, like, if you're going to see a personal trainer at the gym, there are large there's likely more elements that actually can help accelerate their success. And if you're signing up a new customer, they might wanna dip their toe in the water before they sign up for a big contract. And so I think proving value every step along the way starts giving incremental wins to that customer and gives you the right and builds that trust, as I mentioned earlier, to suggest to them, hey. I have an idea on something you're not doing today that some other customers like you are, and here's what that looks like. I would say in our world, we we have advised, my team and our customers, you have too many services. You have underutilized the number of service hours that you purchased. You should move down to the lower tier. You bought too many seats, licenses effectively for those in the platform tech SaaS world. You don't need that many seats. It's it's wasted revenue. So our customers actually have responded very well to that. Again, it's like a personal trainer. We are customizing what they actually need versus maximizing what they bought because that's what was sold. We don't wanna fall into that trap. And in some cases, I'll get into this later in the presentation, we're willing to take a a minor hit to ARR. Maybe we lower the one the ARR, but we stretch it out over three years. I mean, that's something that our chief revenue officer has been open to, and and I think that's certainly where, customer retention being king, I think we're gonna be seeing more of that. Very well said. Very well said. And I I think having a larger focus on keeping our customers longer provides you way more opportunities down the road to hopefully give them more value and expand them. But I think this question also begs another question. It's like an interesting kind of, like, dilemma that we're in. Right? And, like, one of our customers, I had a quote from them, said it well. It's like, when you're doing everything, you're also kind of doing nothing. Right? And and that really resonates. And I'll go back to what I said earlier because, like, I think in most organizations that you talk to and some of, like, the biggest customers that I talk to are dealing with these same issues. And it's like CS is asked to wear a lot of hats. Right? And some of it is due to the way that we've set up our orgs or the current state of our orgs. We might just need to wear many hats due to resourcing in other areas, but think support, think customer strategy, helping with renewals, helping enlist customers to marketing events. I think the list goes on. And a lot of that doesn't necessarily have the holistic commercial focus that I think we as CS leaders really want our teams to to have to have that book of business approach, to have kind of like that that funnel pipeline approach to where we think customers can be healthier and and how we move a customer from from red to yellow to green and really build build our pipeline up that way. And and Carson Stones and I talked a little bit of, when we were prepping for this about the last bullet point that's on the slide here, which is, which is, like, ultimately that interlock that I mentioned on the last slide not existing where sales think we own the expansion and the teeing up of those efforts, but we really think that sales owns the commercial relationships and all that. And so what happens in that circumstance? Two outcomes, in my opinion. You're either not working together effectively and you really degrade the customer experience. They don't know who to go to, or you're just not effective in doing really anything relative to the customer life cycle because you're always waiting for somebody else, to kinda, like, pick up the bag. But at the end of the day, I I think there's an important element where you cannot let attribution and attribution conflict get in the way of your own growth. And as part of that, taking accountability, CSMs need to be really proactive with what their customers need. I think everybody agrees on that. And so the question that I have is, like, how do you drive success if they don't have the right ideas, if customers have broken processes and workflow, but also they don't have the right products for them to actually achieve the goals that they told you they want to achieve their goals with. And with that, we'll talk a little bit about what our opinion is on the blueprint associated with getting there. So we'll talk a little bit more less about the plan, more about the execution moving forward. And like I said, the good news is there is a way out. And so in our opinion, to begin solving the problem and everything that we just talked about on the previous slides, again, first principle, CSMT teams need to be very clear about what they're trying to accomplish, instill repeatable process that helps them also spot the right signals at the right time. We're in an age where there's a lot of cool tech. There's a lot of kinda like signal drivers that help us get customer sentiment, and we gotta use all the tools available to us when we're not actually talking to customers ourselves or maybe when we are, to help also qualify when an expansion makes sense. When we have good qualified expansion, then we can act on insights really quickly in line with sales on every step of the process. And then, ultimately, once we have a proof point built out on that, we're in a position where we can automate and just get better at scaling those type of different things. And so with that, we'll move on to kind of, like, each step of the process, and I'll turn it over to Carson to give some of his point of view on that. Absolutely. So right now, if your teams are anything like mine and Roman's, we have a considerable amount of channels that we are tracking. You can get signal from support tickets, from meetings that you're you have with your customers, from Slack, from Teams, from email, product usage. There are so many signals. What your teams are gonna need help with is how do I qualify? How do I say this is a real opportunity worth pursuing versus maybe this is a nice to have that I'll remember for another time. And so on the next slide, we've kind of visualized what we see as the most common signals that your CSMs are probably relying upon today. That is product usage, net promoter score, and just basic human judgment. How are the vibes on the meetings? It's all the things underneath the waterline that we wanna make sure you're also taking advantage of. You're also getting these signals in a digestible way. They're clean, they're trustworthy, and they're actionable. I think that's the most important part. So if somebody It's like also, like, actually what's going on. Right? Like, it's the full Yes. 360 degree view of, like, what your customer's world is like. Absolutely. And I was actually you you caught me before I started pitching AI. This is what AI was built to do. So again, I'm showing my cards here. I'm I use AI all the time, but I'm an AI skeptic in the way that I don't think that an AI doctor is gonna be, like, operating on me. But I do think that AI is gonna be this invisible fabric underneath the the foundation of everything that we do. When I do a basic Google search now, I'm getting AI assist, and they're actually fairly helpful. That's the type of thing that's the type of tool that we've gotta empower our teams with. So they're not having to wade through all of this information. Roman, I know you have a perspective on this as well, specifically from Gainsight. Yeah. I mean, for one, you know, I just got back from a a conference, that was last week where I had the opportunity to sit down with a lot of, like, peer companies and some of our customers, and it was all about AI. And I think with some of the the challenges that a lot of us are likely facing relative to, you know, we can't scale headcount as fast as we used to be able to relative to revenue growth, etcetera. We have to think about different ways to serve our customers effectively. Said differently, we have to find out ways to make CSMs more productive. And that's, like, where AI really comes in, and there's some really neat tools that I know exist in the market today that our teams are exploring with. And that's probably, Carson, for us, a good icebreaker next time that we kick off one of these sessions is to find out from our audience which tools are being, explored with and where we've gotten some value out of it. But, a a quick selfless plug, we acquired a company at Gainsight called Staircase AI, and it is, you know, a a tool that helps us understand a lot of this below the ice, below the water, sentiment that happens with all our interactions. So there's opportunities to monitor, a little bit big brother y in feeling, but there's a lot of value that comes out of it, like monitor some of the emails that go back and forth between your accounts, understand sentiment from your Gong recordings that you might be having with customers, and really picking out some of those common themes that apply to customers of similar stature, which I think is is really cool. And it allows you to lay layer that level of sentiment on top of your product usage and your traditional health scores, which are more based off of, let's say, data and inputs like user activity and user growth and feature adoption. It gives you that kind of, like, above the line and under the line view of what's happening within your business so that you can focus your efforts in the right spots. I I do wanna give a shout out to the existing tech stack that we use. We have a Gong plug in for Gainsight. We have a Salesforce plug in for Gainsight. We don't have to go with third party tools. They're already built in to the tools we use every single day. And Gainsight even has a Slack app that's AI powered. That's pretty helpful. Like, whenever my leader my my CRO, CCO, whoever is asking questions that are answered in the data, I can point them to that little ask Slack. You know, ask that same question and give real time insights. So I'm finding that extremely helpful. I'm a big advocate of using tooling that you already have and then go out and try to find something to supplement that if needed. Alright. I'm I'm happy to talk about what happens once you identify a good signal. So let's say you've written a playbook for your team. You've said this is what a good opportunity looks like. You have identified, an executive stakeholder who has budget. They have approval to act on this. How do we deliver? How do we actually and this is more of a sales motion for a lot of teams candidly. I've worked at large organizations where you have a renewals org, you have a sales org, and you have a CSM org. And they all have say CSMs do not touch renewal revenue. I've worked at places where CSMs own the renewals, and they own the upsell conversations. I'm lucky to be in kind of a hybrid role today where sales, they do the contracting, they do the legal leg work, but we advise what that should look like. We are the ones who are basically brokering the deal. And I'll get into a little bit about how we incentivize the hybrid structure, in a minute. But the important thing is, if you're gonna ask your CSMs to put on a sales tab, this is art. Okay? You've had an EBR. You've learned about a board level initiative, and you know that your customer does not have the product and services to deliver on that today. How do you how do you introduce new product? How do you introduce that they might have to spend more money with your platform in order to achieve those goals? There are ways to do this well, and acting is just as important as identifying the opportunity. And I'll talk about that in a second, how we actually delivered. After that, you've got to align on the signal and act as one team. So it's you may have top performers who are just naturally good at this. Maybe you have people you've hired from other industries and other roles, and they're just naturally more this way. It's imperative that this just becomes muscle memory. Like, everyone's doing this motion in the same way using the same tools and processes, because if you start allowing, like, wild west, what you're gonna find is, like, people are gonna game the system. And that's not at all what you wanna do. You wanna create a sustainable engine for revenue growth. Not one top performer who comes in, blows the numbers out. Now your your new numbers are way up here, and then that person leaves. That is not at all what we are trying to achieve here. So, between qualifying the opportunity, acting on it in the right time, in the right way with the right people in the room, and then aligning on what that process actually looks like, that's the story I wanna share with you all today. Roman, anything to add before I talk a little bit about our experience? I jumped the gun on giving away your slide. No. I I think that was very well said, and I I think the kind of the the how you put into action is gonna be very eye opening and exciting for the team to hear. I do notice there's a couple of questions that I I think we could hit along the way, Carson, real quick. And one of those was you you mentioned earlier that, you know, your CFO has some alignment with the team in terms of, like, rightsizing contracts based on what they need. You know, the question is, like, how does how does sales feel about that when that happens, and how how have you managed, like, the kinda, like, the bad aspect of of having to downgrade a customer? So I think that one of our core values as a company, We're a smaller player in the field. Like, we know that we're competing against people that are 10 x. And in some cases, we're going up against the biggest fortune 50 companies of all who have a catalog offering. So we're a data catalog platform. We understand that our differentiator is collaboration with customers. And so because that is a core value, we absolutely use that to our advantage. I don't do that. I will simply make the case. They pay my COO and our CRO to make that case on our team's behalf. And so I found when you have good collaboration between your chief customer officer, your chief revenue officer, and the CFO, they do understand, okay, it's far more important to retain customers with the potential for growth, with the potential for advocacy, than it is to say, we're not gonna do business with you, only on our terms. And I've seen this actually go very badly, like, when you audit a customer environment and you say you've overused, you owe us a million dollars. I've seen that email go out. What happens next is so predictable. You're done. That customer does not want to work with you any longer. And so we've really used that core value to open up this conversation. It's never the starting point of the negotiation. That's never our opening salvo. But we have it in our back pocket, and it's really helpful to know for our team to have that flexibility to negotiate. And I think that it reminds me of the chart that we looked at earlier, the importance of retaining your customer, at the point of renewal is paramount. Right? And I think it's this day and age where, you know, their money, their budget money is no longer free. They have to validate. They have to do business cases for all that. Like, they're gonna scrutinize the usage data, in a much different way than perhaps, you know, they did years ago. And I think demonstrating the partnership of treating every renewal as if you're reselling them based off of what they need to accomplish in the next cycle is a really good way to approach the relationship. And I think getting alignment from CRO, CCO, and CFO is is is very well important, so you you said that very well. There's a couple other questions that I think we can come back to and, hit during the q and a because I'd love to flip and look at your action plan. Absolutely. Yeah. I saw a good one about, you know, how to mine these signals. That could be a really good one for for the end. So, how did our team do it? So, again, a few caveats. Right? We're a smaller organization. Again, we were in our series c round. We're dealing with we're dealing with a customer base where, you know, the the contract values are like 6 figures. The the overall, like, ARR that we're looking at, you know, it's not in the billions. We're not talking about a big publicly traded company. We are. We are a start up and and we're proud of that. So this is how we did it in this world. Now adapt and adjust this to whatever size organization you're in and the core values and structure of that organization. But the very first thing that I found, make friends with your Salesforce operations person. These are really, really helpful people to know. We were doing a lot of things in Gainsight that I realized very quickly, these are not actually going anywhere. They're landing in a void. No one's acting on these. So one of my first acts of office in this role was to work with our Salesforce operations, professional to seamlessly integrate this CSQL feature in Gainsight with the existing upsell pipeline. So every if it's an if it's not an op, it doesn't exist to the sales team. But when you create an op, now you're part of a much larger, more mature, and robust ecosystem that includes the partner team, the BDRs, anyone who goes to an event or fields inbound calls or whatever. All ops are treated exactly the same. So when we plugged in to that existing pipeline, everything changed. We were able to cut to to finally incentivize the team and quantify the impact. So how did I even get my team to start submitting c o s q l's? Again, this is where having a a very vocal and competent CCO and CRO can pay dividends. They were able to convince our CFO to pay a stiff. So they said, okay. If sales works this up and they close it, they're gonna get paid a commission just like they would for anything else. But it was CS sourced. We wanna we want to pay the CS team a percentage of every deal that they close to incentivize them to continue to send us warm leads. So the SPIFF program was important. I will say it was definitely you can do this without a SPIFF program. Like, it's it's not a blocker, but it will certainly help jump start, a CSQL program. K. I I'm not aware of it. Kind of add some some commentary on. I love that. I think the the more we can do to kinda, like, tie siloed processes into your your money making tools and systems, the better we're off. Right? I think we're just as guilty as all of our customers about working in silos often. And so I love that you called out working in in in your CRM, Salesforce, in your instance, and you're thinking about, okay. How do we how do we tie our place of work to where sales works? Right? Right? And because they're like, that's one of the things that you often see as a divide. It's like, hey. We're doing something here, but sales doesn't wanna go in our system, etcetera. So I think that's really smart. And then I have a a kind of a question for you as you're talking through this fifth process. How long does something stay a spiff before it becomes kinda like business as usual for you? Yeah. So we did two quarters. We thought that was a long enough time to get new opportunities into the pipeline, work those opportunities, and see them through the completion. Six months is a, you know, a fairly extended sales cycle. I don't know if we're gonna renew this fifth program, candidly. That's up in the air at the moment for a variety of reasons. But the real reason that you wanna do CQLs cannot be a stiff. Because again, someone said in the chat, anyone who's worked in this industry long enough, it will become a quota. That is not what we're trying to do here. Your quota should be your book of business and your renewal rate and, you know, are you meeting the right stakeholders at the right time? Like, those are the things I wanna measure, not did you get lucky and have a big quarter with upsells. So for that reason, showcasing, I think, is equally, if not more important than the SPIFF program itself. So this is what really motivated my team. Is when someone would come in with a new op, I I kinda made it a little friendly competition. I was like, hey, our newest member of the team, the person who's, like, lowest on the totem pole actually has more ops created than anybody else. And that was exactly the point. It was great. Have you had similar friendly competition like that in your CS organization before? I I think especially for spiffs. Yeah. I think anytime you're trying to introduce a new behavior to a team, gamifying it and tracking, like, a leaderboard and celebrating early wins is really, really important to bait to build momentum. So that's exactly what motivated the team. It was it was less about the SPIFF payout, which I I candidly was minimal. I mean, think about how you have, let's say, 10 accounts, and maybe you find upsell ops at five and maybe one or two of them close. Great. Like, I'm glad you're getting paid. That is, like, why I wake up in the morning. But, also, I wanna congratulate you on a job well done. I wanna celebrate the two you got, not the eight you missed. If I'm sitting here judging you on missed shots, you're never gonna be Michael Jordan. Right? Like, to be the that's a fairly old analogy, but it holds true in the CS world. I want people to take the shot. I want people to be rewarded for taking the shot, and then I wanna celebrate when it actually goes through the bucket. And I think, I I think it's important that you called out, like, that the payout doesn't always have to be massive. Right? Because when you're trying to introduce something new, you're trying to validate even if you can change the behavior and then if you should. I think under the hood, the way that I think about it too, it it as a as a manager, not just the business leader, it allows you to see, like, which of your team members can also, like, lean into trying a new process. We're open to potentially changing the way that they work. Because, right, like, we started this conversation with, like, what is it gonna take to get from CSM one point o to two point o to three point o to whatever the next phase is, and, certainly, a huge competency with that is being open to trying new things and working with leadership against business owners. So I love that. So I'll take us home here in the next minute or two. That's what I'm speaking to the CS leaders now or anyone who aspires to leadership. Your job is to showcase your team's impact. Okay? We're all dealing with the reality that CS teams get cut. We know that exists. Our teams know that exists. I can't have them going out there on the field scared every day. Right? Like, they need to know that I have their back so that they can have some swagger and some confidence and and advocate for customers and lead these upsell conversations and ask for the advocacy. If your team is scared, they're not gonna do those things. So you take that number. Alright? This is the formula. How much was your total retention? That's a number. Right? Your ARR for the existing book re retained customers. Then you add closed won upsell opportunities. And then if you're feeling spicy, if your CRO is open to this, you can add in your closed CTAs for risks. You know, risk CTA is a type in Gainsight. We absolutely say we mitigated 7 figures worth of churn this year. These were contracts that we're going to cancel, but we saved them by doing x, y, and z. You know, you can absolutely count that. And so when you get a total number for the CS team, I mean, if you can show that every dollar you spend on headcount and tooling for CSMs results in 5 to $10 in revenue. That's where that's why you do this. Like, in my opinion, that's really when you get to the point of this whole exercise. You're now creating growth for your team. You're creating new teams. You're bringing on new headcount. You're creating promotion opportunities. That was the actual motivator. Right? Like, so the the the very immediate motivator was the SPIFF payout. The middle midterm, motivator was I'm leading the team this quarter. But the real motivator is, hey. We actually are gonna grow. We're gonna open a new team. I want you to be the lead for it. That's what people show up and work for. Yeah. You're playing the long game a little bit. Right? Yes. And I think that's a a really good transition. And you hinted at this earlier, and I think it's an important call out, thinking about the long game that we are playing too. Because I think, fundamentally, the our all our head naturally go to, like, hey. How much are we expanding a customer right now at the point of the renewal, at the point of the upsell? But in reality, again, if we focus on durability and sustainability and keeping customers in business for a long time, sometimes it takes longer for a customer to find that first upsell or to find enough success to grow their business and expand their seat count with your product. And so it's a really interesting and compelling point to think about the total contract value that CSMs are also helping close on customers versus just how much ARR do they have. There is value to your business in terms of thinking about multiyear renewals and how to get customers commit to you for a longer term. Right? If you couple, like, having a longer term customer, then, of course, they're gonna be bought in. You're gonna be able to drive strategy with them. You're not gonna be in a transaction period all the time. And then you can also have more opportunities to understand how they're running their business, what their goals are, and then also, like, where you have the ability to impact their business by selling them another product or another c you know, or whatever the case may be. So that's not to say that ARR isn't important. Certainly, your your financial metrics, especially if you're a public company, are really important to understand what you're gonna project to do next year. But thinking about TCV and the growth of that as another element that helps bring sustainability and durability to our customer success and our customers. I think one thing I would add is TCV is not terribly exciting to a lot of people because when you look at the ledger, it just looks like $0. Right? The ARR remains the same. There's no up, no down. But if you can find a way to capture that, you're talking about three x the ARR over multiple years. No. The CFO won't recognize that, but that should not stop you from sharing that number more broadly because your team took a one year to a three year. That's that's expansion too. It's just expansion in a different direction than, unfortunately, our systems recognize today. Yeah. A hundred percent. And so when we think about the the kinda like the last lever of this is is really automation. And we we talked a little bit about some of the the tools that exist, and I saw there was a question in the chat that we'll get to after our last couple slides here, around kinda, like, some of the tools that we've seen be effective for our teams in the market. But I think I think it's also important that you design your performance management, your compensation frameworks to align with the behaviors that you want CSMs to actually do their job with. Right? And so there's another question about earlier stage companies. Certainly, growth is a more important element for earlier stage companies to acquire market share, to bring more products to market, to get more users in the tool. And so I I think there is an element of prioritizing growth, expansion, and net retention that exists in early stage companies. While you're thinking about mid to late stage companies that have more revenue deployed, more customers under management, already you're trying to maintain those customers, deliver longer value, do more renewals, and deploy new products to those customers to capture your TAM in that space. So automating your expansion place to scale is really important using a bunch of digital tools, and that is where you want to, like, leverage either the tech stack that you have today using your CRM, using tools like Gainsight, Staircase, in our in our instance. But, also, there's there's a lot of other tools that are out there, that help augment different stages of the process that depending on how much budget you have can really help them. And so at the end of the day, there's also in product elements, signal based journeys, automated nudges, in in app promotions to get more users interested in some of the other products that they might not have. Because, ultimately, you want your customer to not only, understand how to do something within your product, also the ROI that they're getting from it, but you want them to identify like, the the richest source of pipeline is actually them identifying that they have a need for something that you get to qualify further and then help your sales team close. And so this is ultimately also one of the ways when we think about the five jobs that Carson talked about needed to be done. When you're talking about advocacy and expansion, you can focus more strategy there because you're not only playing defense on the risk mitigation side of the business and really set your business up for growth. And so to do this at scale, I wanted to just share a couple, of screenshots from, like, our setup and and how we're using our own tool to do some of this. But, again, like, there's a lot of awesome tools that are out in the market. The the takeaway here is there's really three elements that I found most helpful to make sure our customers are healthy and ready to expand. And the first element of that is the scorecarding element where we have a very good understanding of how we've configured what we think a green customer looks like. Green customers are just the most ripe for expansion and renewal. I I think that's true just across any business just assuming that you have your health scores set up correctly. We use the the cockpit within our tool to identify, as Carson mentioned, CTAs or calls to action on based on what signals that we're getting about our customers when our CSMs should engage with a certain activity. Right? At the end of the day, it's the CSMs job to deliver and create new capabilities for our customers using our products so they can meet their goals as a business. And that's the that's the motion that we need to have is to drive that consistent experience regardless of who the CSM working with the customer is. And then we have the the CSQL motion parts that I mentioned doing a a lot of the kinda like the the post creation work in Salesforce. But any way that you choose to do it is making sure that you're working really smart with your sales team to make the friction go away and create a more seamless experience to grow in your customer base. And, Carson Stones, I'd love to hear maybe any any last takeaways that you had before we get to any of the questions that are in the q and a. Absolutely. So I use all three of those today to drive the core actions that you talked about, scorecards, cockpit, and c s q l's. But in our case, with our own CSM from Gainsight, you know, she helped guide us towards is your scorecard optimized. Are you using your cockpit following best practices for the industry? Have you integrated CSQLs with Salesforce? We did all of that before she even began talking to us about Staircase. Well, now my ears are wide open when I'm like, you're telling me Staircase can make all of this easier for me? It's such a different conversation on those terms. Yeah. Exactly. Alright. So Yeah. Let's review them. Oh, I was gonna I was gonna just quickly give them Oh, great. Three takeaways, and then we'll go into q and a. Bottom line, your your team exists. CSMs exist to drive retention, expansion, and advocacy. We do all the other things. We do risk mitigation. We get involved in escalations. But why are we doing it to retain customers, to grow them, and to have them say nice things about us in the marketplace? How do you do that? Well, it's when you're talking about expansion specifically, you've gotta tell them how to quantify leads, you've gotta teach them how to act on those leads, And then you've got to align on what best practices look like. At that point, now let's talk about how to automate this process. If you start the other way around, if you start by automating an ops led approach, you might not get buy in from the CS team. So that's my No problem. Automated that process. Right? Yes. Look, we've gotten it almost automated now, but that was the last piece of the puzzle. And then finally, you gotta incentivize the behaviors that drive the outcomes that lead to growth, not growth and not outcomes. If you if you incentivize the end, you're missing the the core piece, which is the behaviors that drive these also fulfill all five of the CSM two point o mandates. So I think those were those were my key takeaways, from today's conversation. Anything you wanna leave us us with, Roman, before we kick off the air? I did I wanna add something to the last bullet point that you just mentioned because I think as a leadership team, it's equally important to recognize that the environment is changing and that setting setting the behaviors that you want to see and the targets against those is not a set it and forget it forever type of approach. I think, you know, if you've ever changed a role and got to a new organization and, you know, there's some metrics in place that don't make sense and you start asking why, they're like, well, they've always been. Right? Like, you you don't wanna be in a position where that is the answer to how you're thinking about taking your company to the future. And so I I couldn't agree more. I think aligning incentives to the behaviors that you want your team to do is super important. That actually addresses one of the questions that we got in the chat as well when we think about, you know, when you focus on the long term, is there a possibility for CSMs to create an immediate impact in terms of metrics? And I think that having that clear divider in terms of managing performance against what you want somebody doing in the moment that will lead to the outcomes that you want is really important. It's very tough to demand CSMs to have an impact on GRR or churn in the moment. Right? Like, those are generally year on year, quarter on quarter improvement cycles, but what you do want to see improving more in the moment are your customer engagement scores, the the health of your customers, how many automations are set up. I'm sure across this audience, every every product that we're selling probably has one or two metrics that we want to see improved that are most correlated to retention, and that, in my opinion, is where you wanna focus the behavior of the CSM. Do you mind if I get really tactical for just a second on Tara's question? Let's do it. Alright. So I'm actually hosting a meeting later this afternoon. It's called the RedRisk Tiger Team meeting. We do not met like, I I have the number of how many risk CTAs my team closes, but the thing I actually measure them on in a public forum and hold them accountable every week, how many overdue tasks do you have in your risk CTAs? Like, that's the behavior that we're driving. And they're laser focused on it. They say this ticket is creating risk that I put this dollar amount on, and it's owned by this person. And I say, okay. What have you done to expedite that? What have you done to help resolve that problem? And that conversation has been far more fruitful than, hey. Your CTAs are behind. Does that make sense? Yep. And I think that that makes me think of, like, a managing a, like, a a sales process as well. Right? Because, generally, like, if you're a seller, you have a bunch of deals in your pipeline, and what you're what you're working towards is how are you progressing each deal through a pipeline. And so when we think about a customer base and how we make customers healthier, how we sustain customers, and how we grow customers is how are we moving them through the life cycle and what are CSMs doing with their activities to to make that happen. I think that's a great point. Trajectory and progress versus directly inputs and outputs. It's on us as leaders to determine why are we do why are we setting these particular goals at these numbers? You can share why with your team if you're hyper transparent, but they don't care about those details in those cases I found. They just what's the number I need to hit and how am I gonna hit it? Got it. Okay. I got I got another question for you from the audience. And this one came in a little bit earlier, so sorry for for making you wait. But, at your organization, Carson, what are some of the the tools that you use to crunch data and automate engagement with your customers? Yeah. So we have a a true SaaS platform. It's all cloud based. We measure monthly active usage, weekly active usage, and daily active usage. That is quite simply the lowest bar for engagement. Did someone click in our platform? Then we have more sophisticated measures. Many of you and I know Gainsight sells a product called PX, where you can actually see what parts of the platform did they engage with. That's that's also important to us. But again, I see things through the lens of a SaaS platform, so that sort of biases my view about usage and licenses. Yeah. And I think that parlays a little bit into another question that we got around how you work with marketing on those efforts. Because I think, you know, whether it's a broader digital strategy for the long tail customers that you're managing or if you're managing seat based, you know, contracts, is understanding where an individual user is from engaging with your product and leveraging marketing and marketing automation to target and signal those users with the right activities at the right time designed to make them as users more effective in your tool drives the adoption of it. It creates activity. It creates value, and it gives your team a set of data and insights with how a customer might be using your product that then tees up the engagement that you can have with that customer around, here's what we see working, here's what you're doing well, here's what you're doing better than other customers, and vice versa. And that helps create that really healthy kinda, like, strategy narrative and gives us a a a really, like, detailed set of data and information that we can manage our account base with. I think on our end as well, verified outcomes, the specifically, the the the button you click when you close a success objective in Gainsight in a success plan, those have been very powerful motivators for us as well. It's like, are your customers achieving at least one, if not two verified outcomes every single year? And if not, there's a whole iceberg under the water of things that you can address to drive more of that. Yeah. And having access to data is obviously obviously critical, and more data isn't always better. And so the final question that I see in here is, is related to that and particularly asking, like, what the effort and the data required is to to effectively mine signals. I think it's really interesting, and this is where, I believe, depending on the stage of your organization, it's really important to work with the products team if you have an analytics team to actually define what is the path we want a user to take when engaging with our tool. What is the ideal value that we can deliver to a user of this persona? And then you can start monitoring and tracking usage on if that's actually happening. I think all too often, you know, our sales team can do a great job of selling solutions. And if you're selling a platform, selling a platform. But where the rubber then meets the road is, unless you're a fully automated platform where it's just technology talking to technology like an API stack, is people actually have to go in and and do work within a platform to create usage and value. And so I think the initial efforts, if you're setting up a new usage score, can be a relatively heavy lift, but that is one of those things that you consider an investment into how you then set up your your customer go to market motion relative to that lift and be able to define the journey that you want customers to take and how you want CSMs to engage with their customers. There's one I really wanted to answer, but I will leave the queue to you. It had to do with marketing, partnering with marketing. You probably have some interesting ideas about this, but y'all have the marketer in chief, Nick Mehta. Okay. Tune in to all this stuff, and I always want whatever he's demonstrating. So Yeah. There's a couple of layers to marketing. Right? Like, there's the there's the brand marketing. There's the thought leadership that's out there. That is another form of marketing. I also am really heavy on partnering with product marketing to make sure, like, the value props and go to market strategy is aligned between CS, sales, and the marketing team. I think it's really important that we're all kinda, like, speaking the same language of value back to the customer. Yes. I will say that our SPIP program coincided with a really exciting AI product launch, and we absolutely, like, had a little race. Who's gonna find the most upsell ops for this particular product? And it worked. It totally worked. We're talking millions in additional pipeline generated from Xero. Yeah. And I I we have one that left. Carson, you wanna take a look at that last most recent top question specific to your team at data.world? Which Is it is it a practice to collaborate with product teams to determine what success means for example? Yeah. Yes. Oh, my goodness. The audience. At data dot world, our chief customer officer became our chief product officer. So I've never seen that transition before, but it actually worked really well for us. Our CPO fluently speaks what our customers are asking for and understands that. I will say the majority of risks that we have are product related. I need when I hit this button, I need this thing to happen. It maybe it doesn't always happen that way. So our chief product officer understands how to create a road map that will serve the most customers in the most efficient way. But in the other direction, you still gotta build exciting things for the market. You can't just be churn fighting and bug fighting all the time. So we always have to balance what's an exciting new product that will move the market forward that will actually pay 10 x dividends on the initial investment of the engineering talent to build it. That, like, certainly, we partner with product on bugs and fixes, but we also partner with them on, hey. If you're building this new feature, here's kinda how customers needed to look for it to be successful in the market. Yeah. We have those conversations every single week. That's that's awesome. The the partnership's really important. And thank you all for the questions, that you came in. I hope the answers were helpful, and the session was I'd like to welcome Nicole back to close this out. Thank you so much, Carson and Roman. That was such an insightful session, and we know that time is super valuable. So thank you for your very valuable time, and thank you everybody for tuning in. I know I learned a lot, and I hope you all did too. Thank you so much. Have a great evening or a great day depending on where you're tuning in from, and I hope to see you all soon. Thanks, everyone. Take care, and thank you.