Customer Success in the Ad Tech Industry
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Customer success has revolutionized businesses in every industry, but what does customer success look like for the Ad-Tech industry? Join Ganesh Subramanian (Client Strategy, Gainsight) and Greg McLaughlin (Sr. Director of Business Operaitons , Appnexus) for this 60 minute webinar discussing:
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Customer Success in the Ad Tech Industry
- 1. How to win in Ad tech with Customer Success
- 2. Ganesh Subramanian Client Strategy, Customer Success Gainsight Greg McLaughlin Sr. Director, Business Operations AppNexus
- 3. Ganesh Subramanian Client Strategy, Customer Success Gainsight How to Win in the Ad Tech Industry with Customer Success
- 4. “Customer Success is when your customers achieve their Desired Outcome through their interactions with your company.” Lincoln Murphy (Customer Success Evangelist)
- 5. ©2015 Gainsight. All Rights Reserved. TRANSACTION ECONOMY FUNNEL The Old World P R O A C T I V E C U S T O M E R A C Q U I S I T I O N R E A C T I V E C U S T O M E R S E R V I C E S A L E S S U P P O R T $
- 6. ©2015 Gainsight. All Rights Reserved. P R O A C T I V E C U S T O M E R S U C C E S S S U P P O R T A D O P T R E N E WE X P A N D $ $ $ S A L E S ⬆ 5-10% points expansion ⬆ 5-10% points retention ⬆ 3X customer outreaches $P R O A C T I V E C U S T O M E R A C Q U I S I T I O N RELATIONSHIP ECONOMY HOURGLASS The New World
- 7. ©2015 Gainsight. All Rights Reserved. CUSTOMER SUCCESS IN PRACTICE The Challenge STRATEGYSEGMENT High Touch Mid Touch Tech Touch ENTERPRISE MID- MARKET SMB PROACTIVE JUST-IN-TIME AUTOMATED
- 8. ©2015 Gainsight. All Rights Reserved. Coca Cola (Brand) Coke creates a new ad and wants consumers to see it Ad Agency Demand Side Platform (DSP) Coke sends new Ad to an Ad Agency The Agency connects with and sends Coke’s new Ad to a DSP, which enables agencies and brands to find available space (inventory) to display ads Ad Exchange Supply Side Platform (SSP) NY Times (Publisher) The Exchange connects with the DSP and SSP to facilitate a transaction between Coke and the NY Times for the placement of Coke’s new ad The New York Times wants to get $ by selling space (inventory) to a brand NY Times provides inventory for sales to a SSP, which enables publishers to find content to fill their inventory THE AD TECH INDUSTRY The Challenge
- 9. ©2015 Gainsight. All Rights Reserved. AD TECH BUSINESS CHALLENGES 1. Fragmented value chain with entrenched competition within each segment 2. Low barriers to entry increasing net new competition 3. Low switching costs for customers Given competitive landscape, a product focus and sales processes are not sufficient to succeed
- 10. ©2016 Gainsight. All Rights Reserved. How Customer Success Solves those Challenges Consider two firms, Firm A and Firm B… Product Innovation • Both Firm A and Firm B have market leading products (e.g., equal performance on relevant metrics) Sales and Marketing • Both Firm A and Firm B have efficient sales and marketing teams, collateral and processes Customer Success • Firm A focuses on installing the product and minimizing the cost to serve their customers • Firm B strategically understands their customers’ needs; then onboards, trains, and supports their customers so they realize value and ROI
- 11. ©2016 Gainsight. All Rights Reserved. How Customer Success Solves those Challenges The Results Firm A Some customers will succeed with just the product. Most customers will flounder and switch to a competitor product. Firm B Realizes higher retention, increases in share of wallet when compared to competition.
- 12. ©2016 Gainsight. All Rights Reserved. How Customer Success Solves those Challenges But the story continues… Product Innovation • Both Firm A and Firm B have market leading products (e.g., equal performance on relevant metrics) • Firm B leverages it’s customer relationships to develop a superior product over time Sales and Marketing • Both Firm A and Firm B have efficient sales and marketing teams, collateral and processes • Firm B leverages advocates, references, marketing collateral to improve it’s sales efficiency over time Customer Success • Firm A focuses on installing the product and minimizing the cost to serve their customers • Firm B strategically understands their customers’ needs; then onboards, trains, and supports their customers so they realize value and ROI • Firm A: some customers will succeed with just the product. Most customers will flounder and switch to a competitor product. • Firm B realizes higher retention, increases in share of wallet when compared to competition
- 13. ©2016 Gainsight. All Rights Reserved. AppNexus • Leading independent ad-exchange • Gainsight customer since October 2015 • In the midst of a customer success transformation across all BUs and regions • Greg McLaughlin: Senior Director of Business Operations
- 14. Greg McLaughlin Sr. Director, Business Operations AppNexus Leading the Ad Tech industry with Customer Success
- 15. 15 APPNEXUS
- 17. 17 STRATEGIC BUSINESS CHALLENGE CONSUMPTION MODEL Revenue PRIMARILY Generated through Use
- 18. APPNEXUS STRATEGIC OBJECTIVES 75 Customer Success Roles Implementation Consultation • Customer On-Boarding • Initial Training • Systems Integration Account Management • Business Issue Resolution Technical Support • Business Issue Resolution Customer Engagement • Training, Adoption & Value Realization • Account Growth • Upsell / Cross-Sell S U P P O R T A D O P T R E N E WE X P A N D $ $ $ S A L E S $
- 19. OPERATIONAL BUSINESS CHALLENGES Lacking System-Driven Framework for Management Discussions About Key Accounts No Easy Way to Review 360o View of Account Information No Consistent Way to Manage Formal Account Development Plan Lacking Strategic Information When Transitioning Account Ownership Minimal Account Research & Discovery prior to New Business Selling Effort Need for Platform to More Easily Support Cross Selling
- 20. APPNEXUS OPERATIONAL OBJECTIVES Capture of Customer or Prospect Business Goals and Objectives AppNexus Account Objectives Structured around Customer’s Priorities Comprehensive 360-Degree Aggregated Account Information Account Relationship Health Score to Analyze Account Relationship Strength Complete Awareness of Sponsor Contact Status, Influence & Sentiment “White Space” Analysis Showing where Customer Needs Could be Met by AppNexus Solutions Roll-Up Account Plans at Management Level to Understand Overall Portfolio 75
- 21. ACCOUNT SUCCESS PLANNING Account Analysis Account Analysis Account View Across Data Sources (Salesforce + 3rd Party) Ability to Present Dashboard Components on Main Page Ability to Assemble Data from other Data Sources Outside Salesforce.com PDF/PPT Output Cockpit Customer Surveys CasesOpportunities Sponsor Contacts Health Score Success Plan Account Trends Account Analysis 30-Day Revenue Trend +15% 3 Opportunities
- 22. ACCOUNT SUCCESS PLANNING Account History Trends Historic Trends Ability to Capture & Compare Data Over Periods Ability to Trend Non-Salesforce Data Ability to Filter Trends on the Fly Flexibility to Trend Any Dataset Ability for Gainsight to Proactively Initiate Activity Based on Trends Up / Down 79 PDF/PPT Output Cockpit Customer Surveys CasesOpportunities Sponsor Contacts Health Score Success Plan Account Trends Account Analysis
- 23. ACCOUNT SUCCESS PLANNING Account Success Action Plans Success Plans Ability to Identify Customer Objectives & Set Activity Plans Ability to Track & Manage Progress of Activity Plans Ability to Aggregate & Report on Account Plan Achievement Across Portfolio & Team Members Integration of Chatter into Success Plans 85 PDF/PPT Output Cockpit Customer Surveys CasesOpportunities Sponsor Contacts Health Score Success Plan Account Trends Account Analysis
- 24. ACCOUNT SUCCESS PLANNING Account Health Score Analysis Health Score Monitor Changes in Account Health over Time Flexibility in Build Health Score Criteria & Weighting Visualization of Top-Line Trend & Individual Components Ability to Proactively Initiate Activity Based on Health Trend Up & Down 80 PDF/PPT Output Cockpit Customer Surveys CasesOpportunities Sponsor Contacts Health Score Success Plan Account Trends Account Analysis
- 25. ACCOUNT SUCCESS PLANNING Sponsor Contacts (With Built-In Linkedin Connection) Sponsor Contacts Ability to Update and/or Interact with Contacts Directly from Gainsight Ability to Check LinkedIn for Deeper Contact Understanding Ability for Gainsight to Proactively Initiate Activity Based Key Contact Criteria PDF/PPT Output Cockpit Customer Surveys CasesOpportunities Sponsor Contacts Health Score Success Plan Account Trends Account Analysis
- 26. ACCOUNT SUCCESS PLANNING Account Cases Cases Ability to Represent Account Cases Ability to Take Action Directly from Gainsight Ability for Gainsight to Proactively Initiate Business Action Based on Identified Case Red Flags, Critical Issue Types or Lapsed SLAs PDF/PPT Output Cockpit Customer Surveys CasesOpportunities Sponsor Contacts Health Score Success Plan Account Trends Account Analysis
- 27. ACCOUNT SUCCESS PLANNING Comprehensive PDF Plan Document Output ©2015 Acme File Share, All Rights Reserved. Your Future Needs ©2015 Acme File Share, All Rights Reserved. Benchmarks – Compare Against Top Accounts ©2015 Acme File Share, All Rights Reserved. Performance on Key Metrics Source: Altimeter and FactSet 10/2014 PDF/PPT Output Cockpit Customer Surveys CasesOpportunities Sponsor Contacts Health Score Success Plan Account Trends Account Analysis
- 28. Ganesh Subramanian Client Strategy, Customer Success Gainsight Questions? Gsubramanian@gainsight.com Greg McLaughlin Sr. Director Business Operations AppNexus GMcLaughlin@appnexus.com
Editor's Notes
- Introduction: What is customer success? Fundamentally, customer success can be defined based on outcomes. When your customers achieve their desired outcomes through their interactions with your company. The focus is on value realization. Notice there’s no mention of outcomes for the company. Retention, sales, expansion. The core idea with customer success is that when your customers are successful, your company will be successful. Across different industries there are variations in the customer, business relationship. Today, we’ll investigate what customer success means for the ad-tech industry. But customer success hasn’t always been an area of focus. So to dive in, let’s cover how we got here.
- Starting with the background: for years, the B2B business model was defined by the sales funnel. CEOs, boards, teams were focused on net new customer acquisition. As a result, the acquistion funnel became quite sophisticated. Processes and tools were developed and implemented. Meanwhile, post-sales was largely left to support - Reactive troubleshooting when the customer indicated that something was wrong.
- Today, the focus has shifted. The once acquisition driven models are now balanced with post-sales success. Support has been expanded to include proactive onboarding and implementation and strategic customer success. A few key drivers are causing this shift: (1) as companies matured, they needed to generate growth from existing accounts to continue meeting expectations; (2) As companies in the B2C space started emphasizing customer experience, customers in the B2B space started expecting a higher level of post-sales experience; and (3) Increased competition and lower switching costs have forced the hand of the late-movers. The result for businesses has been growth via adoption, leading to expansion and renewal. Gainsight has been at the front of this transformation, helping hundreds of companies rethink and retool their strategy and processes. The result has been increased retention, expansion and a business model that scales. So how do we do it?
- In practice, Gainsight helps our customers develop and operationalize their customer success strategy. This starts with segmenting your customer base and being thoughtful on two factors: (a) what your customers need to be successful, and (b) what you can afford to deliver in terms of service. Your most strategic accounts represent large revenue dollars or expansion opportunity. These are accounts that can’t fail with you, and when they are successful, they pave the way for organic growth and within their industry. Companies need to invest in a high touch engagement model, where your account mangers are delivering proactive training, advice and support. Your company likely has a long-tail of SMB customers. Typically these accounts are prone to higher rates of churn and lower revenue dollars. It’s important to make them successful because as an aggregate, they represent sizable revenue and can determine the market perception of customer satisfaction. However, you don’t have the resources to provide the proactive, human touch that you reserve for your high touch accounts. Gainsight helps you through automation, ensuring that customers get the help they need via custom automated email outreaches, webinars, and blog posts. Then we help set up triggers for the right outreach at the right time by the right post-sales resource. Finally, your mid-market accounts will need a combination of human and tech-touch outreaches in order to be successful. Through Gainsight’s platform, our customers develop the holistic processes and tools to execute across all facets of their business.
- Reinforces that investments in Customer Success results in benefits to the entire company.
- Greg has been leading several of the initiatives to transform Appnexus’s customer success program.
- A little background on our firm. We are a 9-year old technology start-up in the AdTech industry. We are the largest independent AdTech firm in the world. Our biggest competitors are Google and Facebook. Our platform connects buyers and sellers of web-based display, mobile and video advertising and enables them to transact in a real time bidding marketplace. Our platform manages more than 40 billion transactions, called “impressions”. Our revenue model is primarily a consumption model where we make a transaction fee on each impression. We have 23 offices across the world and we have about 1,150 employees, up from about 500 at the start of last year.
- The AdTech industry consists of Advertisers and their ad agencies, who are the buyers of web-based advertising and Publishers, who are the sellers of the web advertising inventory. Between the advertisers and the publishers, there are a variety of potential technology partners including Ad Networks, which buy unused inventory and package it as bundles that they resell to the advertisers. To help advertisers better automate and optimize their advertising spend, Trade Desks and Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) have served as intermediaries interacting with the Ad Network on behalf of the Advertiser or Agency. Also, Supply Side platforms (SSPs) have also started to work with the publishers to help them compete for the advertising dollars flowing through these networks. Lastly, there are Ad Exchanges, which enable Advertisers to link their advertising objectives to targeted audiences in a real-time bidding platform. AppNexus is the worlds largest independent Ad Exchange. AppNexus is unique in the industry as we are not only an Ad Exchange, but we also provide DSP and other services such as automated trading as a trade desk to some of our clients.
- One of the reasons why CUSTOMER SUCCESS is so critical in our industry is because of our revenue model, where we generally earn our income through transaction fees from each transaction. We don’t sell licenses to our platform like many of the SAAS players in the software industry. So, working with our Customers to onboard them quickly and efficiently and then make sure they are highly educated and well-equipped to use our platform successfully becomes our most critical mission. The faster we set up the contract, integrate with the client and train their users, the faster we make our first dollar and ultimately ramp up to the expected run rate.
- So, our organization is largely built around driving Customer Success. Upon signing with Appnexus, we first assign an Implementation Consultant, who manages the customer’s full on-boarding including both the technical and training elements of launching a Customer. Every Customer also has an Engagement Manager, who is dedicated to understanding the Customer’s objectives, needs and challenges and working with them to utilize our platform to address those needs. We also have Account Managers who help guide the Customer through their operational interactions with AppNexus and we have various Customer Service and Technical Services teams that help solve the Customer’s business and technical challenges as they arise. The objective of all our Customer-facing and Customer-supporting teams is to develop a happy, well-adopted customer, who realizes the value of doing business with AppNexus and continues to renew and expand their use of our platform to include a wide range of the services that we offer.
- Given the criticality of Customer Success to our business, we’ve implemented a sales methodology and business philosophy that revolves around understanding and relating to our customers to serve as a trusted partner to them, as opposed to a vendor. A partner asks questions, gets to know the Customer, adopts the Customer’s objectives as their own and develops a model of shared success. As opposed to a vendor that spends more energy talking about themselves and seeking to make a sale. So, to support this operating mentality, we took a look at our process and our supporting technology and realized, last year that, despite pretty solid success in serving as strategic partners to our Customers, we could make process and technology improvements to facilitate this methodology even better. We needed a system-driven framework for capturing and disseminating the critical intelligence about our Customers across all of the Customer-facing and Customer-Supporting roles to ensure full alignment and understanding of the success drivers for that Customer. We needed a more complete 360-degree view of the Customer. We needed a way to construct our plans around the Customers objectives so that no matter who supported the Customer, in every situation, they would understand what that Customer needed and be in the best possible position to provide the right solution at that moment of truth.
- So, we built a Strategic Account planning process and implemented Gainsight as our Customer Success platform to help us better track, manage and communicate knowledge about the Customer, their goals, objectives, priorities and needs. We’ve aggregated information about the Customer’s activity on our platform, any service issues they’ve experienced, the history of our interactions and our assessment of the health of the relationship. We’ve built alerts, called “Calls to Action” to let us know any time the Customer’s activity dips or their service case load increases. This helps us to proactively focus our attention to areas concern well before they become hot issues, keeps us engaged with our Customers at the most optimal times and enables us to stay ahead of problems or challenges before they escalate. We are just coming out of our initial pilot period and plan to launch this across our organization over the course of the year. Results so far have been very positive and our Pilot users love the system as it provides that they did not previously have access to all in one place.
- To give a few examples of how we use the Gainsight platform to manage our Customer Success operation, each Customer has a landing page, where we present an executive overview of the critical indicators. What is the overall health of the relationship? How many Cases and Opportunities are open? Has their revenue trended up or down? Do we have any open CTAs? This gives our Engagement managers a quick assessment of their Account and helps them decide which Accounts to focus on at any given time.
- We also present all of the Customer’s platform usage and spend data, trended over time, to give each Account Team a visual sense of the direction their relationship is going. Prior to our Gainsight implementation, this information existed in other systems Engagement Managers and Account managers had to put this information together from various different sources. Having it all in one place with numerous ways to slice and dice it has enabled them to better focus on spending less time hunting for the data and more time analyzing and using it.
- The Success Plan section is where we support our Customer-Centric Strategic Partner methodology. It provides a way for us to capture our Customers objectives and align our priorities with their needs. Our Pilot users have created quarterly plans for their Accounts and review them regularly with our Management team.
- The Account Health section provides us with a running look at numerous health monitors, providing a Green, yellow or red box in both Subjective and Objective categories on a weekly basis. This enables us to quickly assess our service and performance and diagnose where we need to apply time and resources to improve our relationships with each Account. We can also stack rank our Account by their overall health Score, compare that to the Account revenue and quickly determine where to optimize resources around the most critical risks.
- Customers are made up of Contacts, and hopefully what we call Sponsors, people that partner with us to drive shared success between their organization and ours. In addition to providing quick access and insight into the critical players within the Account, Sponsor Tracking also allows us to link out to LinkedIn to understand each person’s background. Gainsight alerts us when the person’s profile in LinkedIn has changes to ensure that we are fully up to date with each of the Critical Contacts within the Account.
- All Customer Support Cases are represented in Gainsight and can be access and edited right from this screen. Cockpit is the section of Gainsight presents the CTAs alerting the team of a risk or concern that requires attention. The CTAs offer playbooks, which are predefined resolution processes that detail recommended steps to address a given concern. For instance, if logins to our platform drop by a given percentage, the system brings that to the Engagement Manager’s attention, recommends which report to access and provides a cadence of who to call and in what order with internal discover calls followed by reach-outs to the Customer. The CTAs enable us to stamp out hot spots before they flare into flames ad cause us to have to fight fires. And by minimizing time-consuming ”fire drills”, our resources are freed up to spend more time connecting with key customers and adding value
- Lastly, Gainsight allows us to run reports summarizing all of the critical information about the Account including the Health Scores, the utilization trends, our Service performance and many other valuable information that can be used for internal Account reviews or Quarterly Business Reviews with our Sponsors. The information can be output to PDF as a report or to PowerPoint. And we have full control over what we show and don’t show in the output. This gives us the ultimate 360-degree view of our Customer and enables us to focus on proactively driving mutually beneficial relationships with our valuable Customers
- Thank you for the opportunity to present to you about how we seek to deliver Customer Success through our Customer-centric methodology and our Strategic Account Planning process and platform. If anyone would like to learn more about our trusted partnership with Gainsight and how Gainsight has helped us to succeed in our objectives, please feel free to contact me.