The Challenge

What problems was Gainsight trying to solve when they initially hired SOAR Performance Group?

Gainsight is the leading platform for customer success organizations. As the leader in customer success, Gainsight prioritizes demonstrating market leadership in their own approach to customer success management. In 2018, Gainsight launched a new framework called Operationalizing Outcomes to ensure their CSM team was supporting Gainsight customers in realizing the full value of their platform. The Operationalizing Outcomes framework defined the priority business outcomes that a customer should receive through their relationship with Gainsight as well as a maturity model to support customers in realizing more value from their investment over time. As this framework was rolled out, Gainsight realized their customer success managers needed skills to effectively engage with customer executives and key decision makers. CSM teams were skilled at technical conversations, but needed to uplevel their ability to understand priority business outcomes from the customer perspective and clearly articulate the value of Gainsight in achieving those objectives. 

The Solution

How did SOAR address these problems?

SOAR tailored and implemented our Value Realization training to the needs of the Gainsight customer success teams. We created engaging real-life scenarios to practice the type of business outcome conversations Gainsight wanted their CSMs executing more effectively. The training was delivered using interactive workshop formats, which allowed CSMs to practice and apply the techniques to their real accounts. 

When asked about his experience working with the SOAR team, Easton Taylor, SVP of Customer Success at Gainsight replied:

“The experience was great…Right out of the gate you could tell that the things that you were teaching you were also putting into practice. So for example, when we first started to sit down you did a fantastic job of just understanding the challenges and the pains. You used your own discovery framework that you taught all of us and and you used it on me and that was really key for me… you listened, you asked really thoughtful questions, and you got to a point where you could align pretty quickly on like, ‘okay this is the type of offering that we have that can help you fulfill your needs.’” 

Easton also highlighted how throughout the process of working together, the SOAR team communicated well, was organized, and measured the outcomes of the training based on Gainsight’s own definition of success. 

The Results

Gainsight tracked the following direct results of our training:

1. CSM direct executive engagements increased by >200 direct engagements in the first 3 quarters after CSMs completed SOAR Value Realization training. 

When asked about the results of our work together, Easton said it had “a direct correlation to measurements that we track in Gainsight for our customers in our scorecard.”

For example, the Gainsight scorecard measures engagement–what core personas is a CSM working with and what types of conversations is a CSM having with those personas. That engagement measurement increased significantly because of the SOAR training focus on understanding how executives think and how to interact with them.

2. Net Revenue Retention (NRR) and Gross Revenue Retention (GRR) targets were achieved during year 1 of deployment of the SOAR Value Realization training. 

Easton highlighted the impact of our training on retention and expansion:

“Our quantitative outcomes went up significantly because we were having better conversations around measurements that a leader of a  post sales organization cares about. And that is: ‘how can you help me retain customers? How can you help me expand customers? How can you help reduce the cost to serve our customer base?’”

3. CSMs improved their tracking of Return on Investment (ROI) within their accounts.

Gainsight CSMs saw their ROI measurements go up drastically because of improved ability to have the right conversations and verify the ROI that the customer received from Gainsight.

In Conclusion

“We had the framework,” said Easton. “The framework makes sense and the framework was very prescriptive in what we needed to go do to accomplish those outcomes and have that initial conversation. But we wanted  consistency in the way we approached the questions we asked and the approach we had with stakeholders… Rolling  out the framework, rolling out the training- it was just significant results. Bringing it all together led to big results.”

John Thackston, CEO of SOAR Performance Group responded: “That’s one of the things I see a lot, is organizations go through the energy to put together a new outcome framework, but where the outcome framework succeeds or fails is actually at the point of engagement between the CSM and the customer. So I think y’all  were really thoughtful about the way you did that.”

Because of these outstanding results, SOAR was selected as the exclusive resell training partner for the Gainsight professional services organization, a partnership that we continue to enjoy supporting today. Thank you, Gainsight, for choosing SOAR Performance Group!