Gainsight’s Customer ERAS Tour was a hit! – Not the Taylor Swift One – The Customer Success Tour!

How It All Started

Do you remember the 1st time? I do – Guns & Roses at the Colesium in Vancouver, British Columbia – High School Kid on top of the world!

Back to Customer Success. Last March, I participated in the ERAS Tour, and here are the top takeaways shared by the panelists & highly engaged audience who had equally great tips to share.

1. Expansion: 

This is often a team initiative, but one team needs to own it. Whether it is sales or cs, the teams need to agree on their roles, understand what’s in it for them, and be trained on how to ask the right questions.

Looking for ways to help your clients is selling, and helping is not a dirty word. If your team feels enabled and understands how helping sells, they will be more confident through curiosity.

Invest in training your team to help customers!

2. Retention: 

Net revenue retention (NRR) is a big focus of the course, but is it masking churn problems? Gross Revenue Retention (GRR) is important for CS teams to focus on, too – where there is leakage – do you need product involved? Is there an issue with support? Does the company have a Customer Journey Map with clear moments for growth & risk and how to mitigate them?

Understand the leaky bucket, and it starts with a customer journey map.

3. Adoption: 

I argued that adoption today should happen with acceleration. If your clients are going through key moments early in the relationship where they are experiencing ROI, they are more likely to feel confident using the product, seeing value, and looking like a hero to their organization. I am not talking about adopting the whole product in 30 days. I am referring to helping the client leverage the key elements of the product that

1. Has been proven to lead to renewals and expansion
2. That helps the client elevate the pain points they bought in the first plan.

Understand early on why your clients purchased the product; what does success look like 30 days and a year from now? Then start the engagement.

4. Scale: 

Companies are right-sizing, and that means fewer people to mask problems. Now is the time to invest in building playbooks and processes to automate technology so your CSMs can focus on building relationships based on data they can extract from the health scores, reports, and data pulled in from other platforms into one central view. 80% of success is built on planning, and 20% is execution.

Focus on building your methodologies and processes. Then take your team through change management and train them so that they can execute with confidence.