Did you attend Pulse 2016? Or are you wondering what key themes, discussions and problems the Customer Success community talked about? Join Anthony Kennada, VP of Marketing, for a 60 minute webinar deep-diving into the successes, failures and leading ideas of Pulse 2016 including:
13. Personal Email from Nick Anonymous Survey (Gainsight)
On a scale of 0 (not at all likely) to 10 (extremely likely), how likely is it that you would
recommend Pulse to a friend or colleague?
What were the best parts of Pulse 2016?
What should we do differently for Pulse 2017?
14. Personal Email from Nick Anonymous Survey (Gainsight)
53 Responses
79.25 NPS
273 Responses
51.42 NPS
Blended 55.83 NPS for Pulse 2016
+10 Points YoY
16. + Venue
Oakland Convention Center
+ Moving Location to Oakland
+ Integration w/ Local Small Business Community
+ Indoor / Outdoor Experience
+ Overall Design
20. + Keynotes
+ Sal Khan
+ Billy Beane & Bob Myers
+ VC Perspective
Mobile App Top Sessions
CLTV Isn’t the Whole Story: Don’t Shortchange Second Order Revenue
Customer Success is the New Career Track to CEO
Stories of Big League Customer Success from Cisco and IBM
Education as the Cornerstone of Success
Delivering World Class Customer Success at Scale
Account Planning: Driving Lean Revenue with an Effective Planning Process
Advanced Tactics for Planning and Executing an Executive Business Review (EBR)
22. - Agenda Construction
- No 35 minute sessions
- All sessions same length
- Sessions throughout for individual contributors, startups,
deep-dives
- Bring back workshops
- Some presentations vs. all panels
- Day 3 communication break down
- Repeat popular sessions
- More for non-tech audience
- Better closing
- Agenda navigation (sync between web and mobile app)
24. + Childlike Joy
+ Over 100 positive comments about Disney skit
+ Audience giveaways (Warriors Tickets & Hamilton)
+ Energy & Creativity
“Disney skits were cheesy and not necessary”
25. Looking to 2017
• Venue: Excited to be back in Oakland – good ideas on scale + capacity planning.
• Childlike Joy: True to our brand.
• Big Investments: Wi-Fi, coffee & snacks, lunch efficiency, parties.
• Staff Training: More planning with hired staff to incorporate our values.
• Agenda Planning: Better navigation, uniform session length, advanced registration.
• Day Three: Complete reinvention – won’t be a binary choice.
I. Makeup of folks on this webinar (60% of people did not go to Pulse)
I.. What is Pulse
II. YoY Growth – leading indicator growth in the community
People bringing their whole teams (# of Companies who brought 5 or more / Total # of Companies attending) Quote about bringing your whole team
Company Size (CS is not just for startups)
Survey
Introduce Survey Methodology
Show NPS for both methods and blended (give context behind what the number means)
Quote
Format for the below (Show conflcting quotes, address for next year), Start with positives, consider intermixing
Dectractors (3) – Venue, Content (Deeper Content for Advanced Attendees, Self-Promotion on Speakers, Slide Distribution, etc.) , Gainsight Sales Pitch (Overcompensated this year from last year)
Promoter (3) – Childlike Joy, Success Unplugged/CSU Live, Keynotes (Except for Jeopardy)
Key Themes (Nick)
Session Scanning Data
Ingredients
What’s Next?
- Microsite launch Friday (w/ videos, slides, and behind the scenes content) chance to sign up for 2016
- PulseCheck & Pulse Career Fair
Pulse Europe
Driving Value for Your Customers is More Important Than Driving Adoption
The most important thing in driving customer longevity is making sure that you’re actually fulfilling your customer objectives. Customers don’t buy your product because they want to login every day, they buy your product because they actually want to get value from it. It’s not just up to Customer Success to drive value – it’s a cross functional effort that starts with Sales. We need Sales to discover our clients business objectives. We need Services to deliver against those objectives during onboarding. We need our Customer Success team to drive change at our clients in order to demonstrate ROI.
Demonstrate ROI of Your Customer Success Efforts Internally
Making customers happy sounds great, but what’s the financial return on actually investing in Customer Success? Your CEOs may be asking where’s the meat in Customer Success? We often talk about financial metrics such as the impact on gross retention. But we can all agree that gross retention is a lagging indicator of whether we’re actually making progress on a daily basis. In fact, the innovations that we might introduce today may not affect renewals until a year from now. So lagging outcomes aren’t enough. We also can’t just focus on the activities that we’re doing everyday such as resolving risks, conducting training sessions, etc., because senior executives don’t really care about the number of calls being logged. We need a near term metric that’s meaningful, and that’s where leading indicators come into play.
Innovative teams are focusing on those intermediate operational metrics that we can make progress against on a day to day basis, but that also means something to our board and executive team. We introduced a notion of an adoption currency that’s correlated with driving value for our customers and also with our longer term financial metrics like gross retention.
Drive New Sales
We talk a lot about managing risk and getting ahead of the renewal, but the strongest CS teams align themselves with their Sales teams – showing that they can drive new business. The first way to drive new sales is through expansion or upsell, that’s new ARR. Some teams are responsible for it, others contribute leads to the sales team for upsells. CSM teams can also make your customers extremely referenceable so they can talk to prospects about the really positive experience they’ve had. CSMs are critical for helping define new use cases for your product that can be codified in case studies that open up new markets for you. CSM teams can generate advocates amongst your customers propelling word of mouth, lowering your acquisition costs. Among the most innovative teams are differentiating their company in the sales cycle by allowing Account Executives to talk about how amazing the customer experience is. Your prospects don’t just want to know about the roadmap for your product, they want to know the journey map for your onboarding.
At Gainsight we take this so seriously that we instituted a target for our Customer Success team to drive references, case studies and other forms of advocacy. We consider it to be a fundamental part of the ROI for our team.
Align Your Company Around Your Customers
Customer Success isn’t just a function, it’s a company imperative. We need to get all departments aligned around the customer at the center of our company. We need Sales not just to close new deals, but to set up our customers for success. We need Services not just to aim for a gross margin target, but to drive fast time to value in onboarding. We need our Support team not just to close tickets, but rather to thoughtfully prioritize how they approach them.