Allison is indebted to her team members Kelly DeHart, Barr Moses, Ashvin Vaidyanathan, Sara Vaughan, Jan Bauer, and many other Gainsters for their teamwork in creating this charter!
Our Pulse conference was a-buzz with questions about org structure. Among them:
What are the details of Gainsight’s new organizational structure?
How can we maximize alignment across functions in driving success for our customers?
How can we clarify roles, responsibilities, and metrics for each post-sales function?
How can we pinpoint a precise definition of “Customer Success?”
At Gainsight we recently re-organized our entire post-sales organization to drive Customer Success. In this post, I’ll describe our new Customer Success organization in much more detail.
Recap of Our Re-Org
As a recap, here was the Before and After:
You can learn more about the factors that motivated this organizational change here.
Recall that we started by identifying three customer needs (in the blue boxes below) and then created 3 departments, each of which is fully accountable for addressing its designated customer need.
Those 3 customer-facing departments include the following functions. See also the 2 additional, internal departments, which support the other 3.
Points of Clarification
#1: We refer to the entire umbrella organization, which includes these 5 functions, as the Customer Success organization. Customer Success no longer refers to just CSMs; it’s the objective of all 5 functions.
#2: The CSMs report into a department that’s now called Client Outcomes. That’s because the particular brand of CSM at Gainsight is focused on translating the client’s business objectives into ROI on their Gainsight purchase, i.e. making sure that the client’s desired “outcome” materializes. They’re not focused on answering technical questions; that’s what our Technical Success group does. I describe the CSM role as well as the various Technical Success roles in more detail below.
#3: You can learn more about the value of Customer Success Operations here.
#4: Customer Success Sales is the name of the team that’s responsible for renewals and expansion for our smaller and midmarket customers. You can learn more about why we created that team here.
Creating an Organizational Charter
Even after we decided on the high-level org structure, there were still plenty of questions. To address those, we created a charter for every function within the organization.
Each charter includes:
Mission of the function in 1 sentence
Operating metrics that define success for this function
Cost metric that determines how to budget for this function
Activities that allow the function to achieve its mission
Risks to the mission that the function needs to manage
Dependencies on other teams
You can download a template for this charter here.
Here are some tips for defining each component of the charter:
Mission
The mission should be to address a need that the customer has — not a need that your company has. This is a radical shift in mindset. It’s an indication of how much we believe that companies need to re-orient themselves around their customers.
If you can’t clarify the mission in 1 sentence, you probably need to think about it more.
Operating metrics
The vast majority of these metrics will not be financial. Financial metrics (e.g. renewal rate) are typically lagging indicators of whether you’re making progress. Your innovations today may not affect your renewal rate for another year. You need nearer-term metrics to see whether you’re on track.
At the same time, it’s not enough to track activities, which may or may not be productive, and which are too granular to report up to your CEO. (S/he most likely doesn’t care how many calls your CSM team had last week.)
Choose operational metrics that (1) are predictive of the ultimate financial outcomes you’re aiming for, (2) help you measure the success of your day-to-day activities, and (3) are likely to be important from the perspective of your CEO…with a little education from you 🙂
Cost metric
This metric should help you determine whether your current investment in this function is reasonable.
Caveat #1: The fact that this type of Customer Success organization combines multiple functions allows you to allocate cost flexibly across them. For example, you might decide one quarter that your most important operating metric is Time-to-Value and that, therefore, you’re willing to sacrifice budget in Client Outcomes in order to bolster your Onboarding team.
Caveat #2: Some teams don’t lend themselves to cost metrics. For example, we think of investing in Customer Success Operations as similar to making a capital expenditure or hiring engineers. When we hire on that team, we’re making an upfront investment that will pay dividends down the road by helping the rest of the org scale effectively. The key decision you have to make is how much you’re willing to invest for the long-term. That said, as a rule of thumb, you should start considering your first CS Ops hire once you have ~5 CSMs.
Activities
Spend significant time documenting exactly what you expect each team to do.
A time analysis can help you discover the full range of activities that each team is currently working on. You might realize that there are overlaps in activities across teams, or that there are gaps between them. You might realize that certain teams are doing things that you never would have expected them to do. That’s one reason why creating this charter is a highly productive exercise.
Risks
Write down all the things that can go wrong as you try to achieve your mission.
We’ve previously documented the key risks we focus on here.
This time, when fully defining each function, we added more risks that the non-CSM departments should manage.
Dependencies
Ask each function: What do you expect other functions to do in order to help you achieve your own mission?
You’ll probably realize that Function A expects Function B to do things that B didn’t think was its job at all.
Once you’ve documented all dependencies, add to Function B’s Activities section to ensure that B actually focuses on fulfilling A’s expectations. (I have not done this in the charters below, in order to keep them concise for the purposes of this blog.)
You might also decide that some of A’s expectations are unreasonable, in which case you should clarify that A needs to build its own capabilities to fulfill those needs.
I haven’t listed each function’s dependencies on the Internal Training & Enablement or Customer Success Operations teams because those are intuitive based on those 2 teams’ missions.
Now let’s dive into the actual charter for each function.
CSMs
Mission: Translate business objectives into real change and ROI for the client
Operating Metrics
Leading indicators of Renewal
Habits Scorecard Measure: Net # of clients moved into Green or Lime.
Executive Adoption Scorecard Measure: Net # of clients moved into Green. (We want to see executives using our product.)
NPS
Client Outcomes CSAT: Is the customer satisfied with the way we are identifying their business challenges, and suggesting best practices to address them in Gainsight?
We also have a few leading indicators that are works-in-progress. I’ll publish more on these in the coming weeks.
# of Success Plan Objectives closed. (For now, here’s how we use Success Plans.)
Movement to higher Value Stages. (The idea is that we want to drive value for our customers, not just adoption.)
# of Saves: Move customer from a state of Red to Yellow.
Leading indicators of Expansion
Deployment Scorecard: Net # of clients moved into Green/Lime. (We want to make sure that the licenses the customer has purchased are ultimately deployed. This paves the way for the sale of additional licenses.)
We also have leading indicators that are works-in-progress:
CSM-qualified upsell opportunities. (We want CSMs to provide leads to the Sales or CS Sales team.)
# of POCs converted. (Our CSMs and Onboarding Project Managers drive the success of a POC, which ultimately allows the salesperson to convert the POC to a long-term deal.)
Leading indicators of New Business
# of Sales References
# of Case Studies
# of Events that the customer participated in as a speaker
# of Prospect Meetings that the CSM joined and after which the prospect signed a deal with us
Here are the leading indicators that are works-in-progress:
# of Opportunities generated through Referrals. (We are thinking through how to track these more effectively.)
# of Prospects where a stakeholder came from a current (happy) customer
Cost Metric: $ of fully loaded CSM cost / $ ARR managed
Activities:
Align with Executive Decision-maker and conduct activities to drive that relationship
Strategy Sessions: kick-off meetings for new customers where we identify the customer’s business objectives and “success criteria” for onboarding
Drive to alignment across multiple stakeholders at the client
Use Success Plans to define, drive, and demonstrate value to the customer
Conduct Train the Trainer Sessions
Conduct Best-Practice Workshops
Quarterback cross-functionally within Gainsight, on behalf of the customer
Executive Business Reviews
Risks (click the link to the left to learn more about the following risks)
Renewal Risk
Habits Risk
Deployment Risk: the risk of downsell because a small percentage of licenses have been deployed.
Sentiment Risk
Company Risk
Requests from the customer for contract extension, breakage, other alteration
Dependencies
On the Onboarding department, for ensuring the customer’s Gainsight administrator is 100% ready to own their Gainsight configuration after onboarding. Specifically:
Onboarding Solutions Architecture, for providing documentation of the customer’s instance for the Gainsight administrator
Onboarding Training, for providing Admin 101 training
On Onboarding Project Management, specifically, for:
Fleshing out detailed use cases for the customer and ensuring that these align with the customer’s expectations
Delivering a detailed project plan that the customer has agreed to
Providing weekly updates to the Decision Maker and Adoption Champion (mid-level manager) at the customer on project status
Leading technical implementation meetings with the customer
Running internal meetings to prepare for customer conversations about onboarding
Escalating risks to project timelines internally and to the customer as soon as the Project Manager identifies an issue
Providing information about the ways in which the customer’s business objectives were addressed during onboarding
On Onboarding Training, for:
Providing instructors to lead Gainsight administrator and end-user training programs
Providing training materials and leave-behind job aids for end users and their managers (Adoption Champions)
On Customer Success Architects, for helping customers with additional configuration of Gainsight after onboarding (assuming there is no statement of work, in which case our Onboarding organization handles the new project)
On Support, for handling break-fix and how-to questions
Customer Success Sales
Mission: Guide the customer through their decision on the renewal (by demonstrating the value the customer has achieved) and on expansion (by educating the customer on value they could achieve) — specifically for our SMB and Midmarket accounts. (The Sales team retains accounts in our Strategic and Enterprise segments.)
Operating Metrics
Renewal
Gross Renewal Rate
Levers of Gross Renewal Rate:
Resolution Rate: Tracks how effective the team is in resolving renewals within the quarter
Calculated as ARR of all quarterly expiring deals Resolved by end of quarter (Closed or Lost), divided by total ARR eligible for renewal in the quarter
Close Rate: Measures how effective your team is in winning the available renewal business
Calculated as ARR of all quarterly expiring deals Closed by EOQ divided by ARR Resolved by EOQ
Conversion Rate: Measures how effective your team is in driving upsells & minimizing discounts
Calculated as the ‘New’ ARR for quarterly expiring closed deals divided by Original ARR
Expansion
Net Renewal Rate
Cost Metric: Cost per $ of renewal; cost per $ of upsell
Activities:
Participation in Executive Business Reviews: guide strategic discussions on ways to drive additional value
Work with customers on an ROI assessment
Identify white space
For our smaller customers, our CS Sales representatives take on a hybrid Customer Success / Sales role, and thus take on some CSM activities mentioned above.
Risks
Renewal Risk
Downsell Risk
For our smaller customers, our CS Sales representatives take on a hybrid Customer Success / Sales role by managing upstream risks in the relationship:
Company Risk (Sponsor Change)
Sentiment Risk
Habits Risk
Dependencies
On the CSM (since we assign both a CS Sales representative and a CSM on midmarket accounts), for:
Including the CS Sales representative in EBRs and other key relationship meetings
Mitigating upstream risks to the renewal
Identifying expansion opportunities
Onboarding – Project Managers
Mission: Drive fast time-to-value and sustainable success by leading a structured process to achieve a defined set of business objectives.
Operating Metrics
Admin 101 Completion Rate: Make sure that the customer completed training at the start of onboarding
Time to Technical Enablement: Customer completed configuration of Gainsight
Time to Launch: Customer launched Gainsight to the team
Time to Initial Value Moment (IVM): Customer was in Green or Lime Habits for 2 weeks in a row
Onboarding CSAT
NPS (NPS survey sent after project close)
Cost Metrics:
Gross margin for Onboarding Services
Leading metrics for gross margin:
Billable Utilization per person: % of hours spent on billable activities
Productive utilization per person: % of hours spent on productive activities (including improving our processes or content)
Delta between actual hours and planned hours from the statement of work
Activities:
Manage all new customer onboarding and statements of work (SOWs) associated with upsells that require more than 50 hours of work (the Technical Success department handles the rest)
Design content and structure of various onboarding programs
Manage the onboarding journey
Prepare for and participate in the Sales to Post-Sales internal Hand-off meetings
Schedule, prepare for, and lead the Kickoff Meeting for the customer
Create a project plan that follows internal guidelines, and get approval from the customer
Regular (minimum weekly) cadence of internal and external communications on the project plan, including a Status Report sent to the customer and an internal Chatter Update
Financial reporting for each SOW
Maintain the project plan and track time
Capture the specific use cases and configuration deliverables
Consult with CSM to create User Stories
Do a subset of technical configuration: Configure GS functionality via UI (Reports, Dashboards, Rules)
User Acceptance Testing and End User Training preparation and materials, in collaboration with the CSM
Position the customer for success post-onboarding
Coordinate the documentation of the customer’s instance of Gainsight
Ensure the Gainsight Administrator at the customer is ready to own the Gainsight configuration – or else recommend the appropriate Technical Success Admin-on-Demand program (a type of managed services)
Ensure that the set of Business Challenges initially aligned on with the customer are addressed by the configuration
Risks
Onboarding Risk: Project plan is at risk or customer is unhappy with onboarding
Initial Value Moment 90-Day Risk: Customer has not achieved Green or Lime Habits within 90 days of contract signature
Initial Value Moment 120-Day Risk
Readiness Risk: Design processes (e.g. internal content, training, readiness assessments for prospects, etc.) with the Sales team to ensure that customers are ready for onboarding
Actual Hours > Planned Hours
Requests for alterations to the Onboarding Services contract
Capacity Risk: Risk that a team member cannot deliver on customer requirements due to bandwidth constraints
Dependencies
CSM for managing the overall relationship with the executive sponsor. However, the project manager communicates updates on the project plan to the sponsor
CSM, for confirming that the anticipated project deliverables and user stories align with the business challenges identified
CSM, for managing the launch of the customer’s instance of Gainsight to their team
Technical Success, for providing technical guidance to customers after onboarding
Technical Success, for managing statements of work that require less than 50 hours
Onboarding – Solutions Architects
Mission: Contribute to fast time-to-value and sustainable success by thoughtfully designing an architecture to support customers’ use cases and ultimately delivering instance documentation to the customer.
Operating Metrics: Similar to those for the Project Managers
Time to Technical Enablement: Customer completed configuration of Gainsight
Time to Launch: Customer launched Gainsight to the team
Time to Initial Value Moment (IVM): Customer was in Green or Lime Habits for 2 weeks in a row
Onboarding CSAT
NPS (NPS survey sent after project close)
Cost Metrics:
Billable Utilization per person: % of hours spent on billable activities
Productive utilization per person: % of hours spent on productive activities (including improving our processes or content)
Delta between actual hours and planned hours from the statement of work
Activities:
Project Deliverables
Participate in appropriate Kickoff, Status, Working and Onsite meetings
Facilitate Data Discovery sessions
Design architecture to achieve customer requirements
Document design for customer review and approval; for use in configuration
Configure Gainsight including MDA, data integrations, Connectors and business processes via Gainsight Admin UI
QA configuration deliverables
Operations
Provide accurate and timely time-tracking and task management updates
Document the customer’s instance via established processes in GonG (i.e. the Implementations object, Integrations object, Customizations object)
Contribute to internal best practices
Establish architecture and solutions best practices
Contribute to Vault (our best practices library within Gainsight): Each SA nominates 1 new Vault Asset (either Rules or Reports) and builds it in a Demo Org each week
Contribute to the Training team’s content
Provide timely, constructive feedback to the Product team for enhancements and blockers
Risks
Onboarding Data Risk: When the customer notices a discrepancy in their data within Gainsight
Identify Product Risk
Dependencies
Product team, for advising the customer on advanced use cases
Technical Success team, for escalating advanced troubleshooting to the Product team
Technical Success team, for managing a ticket related to a bug identified during onboarding
Onboarding – Training
Mission: Contribute to fast time-to-value by educating the customer on how to administer and use Gainsight.
Operating Metrics
Admin 101 Completion Rate: Make sure that the customer can complete training at the start of onboarding
Admin 101 CSAT
Cost Metrics:
Billable Utilization per person: % of hours spent on billable activities
Productive utilization per person: % of hours spent on productive activities (including improving our processes or content)
Delta between actual hours and planned hours
Activities:
Instructor-led training during onboarding
How to configure Gainsight and other training for administrators
End-users
Paid 1:1 training engagements
Online training curriculum
End-users
Administrators
Self-paced onboarding
Risks
Admin 101 not completed by administrator
Delayed Training milestone
Admin change during Onboarding (in which case we’d need to get the new admin up to speed)
Dependencies
Product Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) on the Product team, for providing technical details about the product
Product Education team, for providing certain technical content and ensuring that we’re ready to train customers on new product releases
Technical Success – Support
Mission: Tackle inbound challenges relating to the customer’s existing configuration, quickly and to the customer’s satisfaction.
Operating Metrics
Time to resolution for tickets (excluding tickets relating to verified bugs and product feature requests, for which our Engineering and Product teams are responsible, respectively)
% of tickets resolved in < 8 biz hours
% of tickets resolved in < 5 business days
% of tickets resolved in < 10 business days
% of tickets resolved with 1-touch; average # of touches per ticket
% of tickets with SLA breaches
Average time to resolution
CSAT
# of Knowledge Base articles published
Cost Metrics:
COGS as a % of revenue
Leading metric: Cost per ticket
Activities:
Troubleshoot the following customer inquiries via ticketing system (could be submitted to success@gainsight.com or via our website):
Break-fix questions relating to the existing configuration and features enabled in the customer’s instance of Gainsight
How-to questions on the existing configuration and features enabled
CSM best practice questions
Build Support knowledge base: content that can answer a customer’s question (to help the customer avoid having to submit a ticket)
Risks (click on the link to the left to learn more about the risks below)
Support Risk
Bugs Risk
SLA Breach
Dependencies
Onboarding team, for documenting customers’ configurations
Technical Success – Customer Success Architect
Mission: Help customers with new configuration after onboarding, quickly and to customers’ satisfaction.
Operating Metrics
Time to resolution
% of tickets resolved in < 8 biz hours
% of tickets resolved in < 5 business days
% of tickets resolved in < 10 business days
% of tickets with SLA breaches
Average time to resolution
CSAT
# of Knowledge Base articles published
Cost Metrics:
Gross margin for managed services (when the customer outsources administration of their Gainsight instance to us)
Leading metrics for gross margin:
Billable Utilization per person: % of hours spent on billable activities
Productive utilization per person: % of hours spent on productive activities (including improving our processes or content)
Delta between hours purchased by the customer and hours expended
Activities:
Provide net-new configuration post-Onboarding — either configure it for the customer or show them how to configure
Execute statements of work after onboarding that require less than 50 hours. (SOWs with more than 50 hours are handled by the Onboarding team.)
Provide managed services
Risks:
Configuration Risk: when configuration is taking longer than expected or is bumpy
Data risk after onboarding
Requests to alter the Managed Services contract
Dependencies:
Onboarding, for setting up a proper configuration and training the Gainsight administrator on their instance
Technical Success – Community
Mission: Create a vibrant Community that (1) helps customers — including administrators, executives, team leaders, and end users — exchange ideas and solve problems together, (2) provides a concentrated knowledge base, and (3) creates a stream of feedback on our product and customer experience from customers back to Gainsight.
Operating Metrics
Awareness: # of visitors (new and total)
Consideration: % active customers (monthly active customers / total customers)
Engagement: % MAU (monthly active users / total users)
Retention: % of posts that have been resolved
Average time to resolution
Self-Sufficiency: % self-service (one customer resolving another customer’s post)
Ratio of Community page views to Support tickets. (We’d like to see this ratio increase over time, as customers engage more in Community and rely less on our Support team.)
Cost Metrics:
Cost per topic resolved on Community. (We want to help customers help each other; the more customers who are engaged on Community, the lower the cost to Gainsight to resolve each post.)
Activities:
Make Community the best platform for customers to get answers about Gainsight and about Customer Success more generally, by:
(1) activating new customers and users
(2) ensuring a closed loop on questions / ideas / problems
(3) creating a high-quality knowledge base
Risks
Unanswered question: When a question hasn’t been answered within 48 hours
Dependencies
Onboarding, Support, CSA, and CSMs, for encouraging customers to engage in the Community
Customer Success Operations, for executing Copilot Outreaches to encourage participation in Community
Customer Success Operations
Mission: Make all the teams within our Customer Success organization run smoothly together and with other Gainsight departments (e.g. Sales, Marketing, Product)
Operating Metrics
Supports the attainment of the metrics owned by other teams within the Customer Success organization
Cost Metrics:
We invest in Business Operations as though it’s an R&D expense, similar to Product or Engineering. We’re investing for long-term scalability.
Activities:
Manage our own instance of Gainsight, including Copilot outreaches and Surveys
Analytics, using Reporting within Gainsight
Prepare materials for board meetings
Own financial planning and hiring forecasts for Customer Success organization (working cross-functionally with Finance)
Design and build systems to identify upsell opportunities, manage renewal risks, and track and forecast renewals
Enable CSM efficiency by providing data and materials to the team
Help other departments design processes that are then configured in Gainsight
Help determine the metrics on which bonuses should be based and track progress towards those metrics
Help implement meaningful segmentations and optimize customer journey for each segment
Lead cross-functional initiatives and design processes to help the functions work together more smoothly
Customer Success thought leadership content, including developing Assets for Vault (our best practices library within the product) and helping me with these blog posts! (If you’re looking to blog more, your Operations team can help you.)
Maintenance operations – including renewals and upsells operations, commissions, systems maintenance, etc.
Risks
Process gaps and cross-functional pain points
Manage our Customer Success Scoreboard and identify risks to achieving our metrics
Manage our weekly At-Risk (aka Code Red) customer meetings
Renewal & Upsell processing risk: risk that the order form isn’t processed correctly, or that the commission calculation is wrong.
Dependencies
On all teams within the Customer Success org, for their partnership in developing effective processes and their feedback on existing processes
On Onboarding and Client Outcomes, to nominate and build Assets for Vault (our best practices library)
Internal Training & Enablement (known as GEEK – Gainsight Enablement for Expert Knowledge)
Mission: Make Gainsters extremely knowledgeable about our product.
Operating Metrics
Employee scores on certification tests
Engagement Survey results relating to enablement
Activities:
Run training programs for Customer Success organization (and also our Sales team)
Technical new hire training program
Certification programs for each category of technical knowledge and for new product releases
Coach team members 1-on-1 and in groups
Be a conduit of information from our Product and Engineering teams
Risks
Certification risk (poor scores)
New hire risk (slow ramp)
Dependencies
On Onboarding Training, for Admin 101 materials and content, which can be used to train internal team members as well
On Engineering, for specialized product training
On the various teams, for specialized job-specific training, e.g. Project Managers for training on our project management / time-tracking system, or the Support team for training on our ticketing system
On Solutions Architecture SMEs, for detailed training on specific product capabilities