In 2011 when CS meant ANYTHING besides Customer Success . . . . I read the best book ever named “The Ultimate Question.” More on this in a minute. Let’s talk about how Gainsight started a revolution with a new category and we’re all in.
Our company had a “test group” to sell software on a subscription. The company had a path to $1B in perpetual revenue selling deals for millions, and I was in charge of our first renewal after a year that was $6k.
Salesforce coined the term “Customer Success” and we thought, that’s a cool name, let’s use it. Subscription had just become a thing and we were putting massive effort into free app that trialed the paid app and slowly grew from their month over month.
We started to get traction as a SaaS app with tiny deals and then all of the sudden we hit a wall. It seemed like more customers were leaving us than joining. “How do we even measure this?” Was the question at our sub-company offsite which consistened of the entire GTM team sitting around a table at a beach hotel in half-moon bay.
Dan Niemann, our head of cloud sales at the time, asked me to start Customer Success from scratch and have a quota on Renewals. The ones that we kept losing. I vehemently said NO, but he persisted and finally talked me into it! I remember I was at Disney world living high on a sales quota and worried that was my last trip to be responsible for this!
Making Customer’s Successful was easy in a POC but how do we make sure they keep using the product after we stop handholding them? How do we know who is going to Churn or Expand without asking?
“Would you recommend us to a friend?” That’s the ultimate question. Would you recommend anything to anyone if you weren’t sincere? No you wouldn’t. If you didn’t respond to someone asking, you wouldn’t. Truly the ultimate question. I had to find software that would do send this out to all of our customers right away!
That’s where I found Dan Steinmann at a 3ft table booth at the Salesforce City tour in Dallas, called JBARA. Darren Cunningham, who ran our marketing at the time told me it might be worth looking at because all I talked about was this book and my new role! Customer Success!
This was GOLD. Pure Brilliance. The first software product focused on Customer Success. We organized and send the Net Promoter Surveys (NPS) to every one of our customers and right away we knew exactly who had intention to keep subscribing, churn on us or was begging for more!
We were customer #5 at JBARA, now known as Gainsight, (roughly the same size as Intelligage is now.) We were so enthralled with the results that we promoted everywhere we could, even to Battery Ventures who funded their Series A and changed the name to Gainsight, and brought in Nick Mehta and Anthony Kennada to truly put Customer Succes on the map.
The Series A funded the first Pulse conference, and I was invited to join the journey. Speaking at every Pulse, watching it grow, seeing the millions of professionals switching to Customer Success as a profession over the next 10 years. The first person to buy Gainsight 3 times!
Choosing Gainsight as a partner was probably the best thing that we ever did as a company and it started before we even had a company! Intelligage (Formerly CompleteCSM) was the first Vendor on Gainsight’s Marketplace, the first AI vendor in customer success 2 years ago.
CSMs everywhere are asking the ultimate question in their daily video calls, support tickets and yes still surveys. Even if NPS is dead, it’s the email spam method that doesn’t work. People work with people and it’s based on recommending and spreading the word about your software.
Customer are answering the ultimate question with their body language, when they lean in on a call to show interest, or their Emotional Intelligence when they engage your sales, customer success or support reps in lockstep.
Generative AI and the multiple Nicks were all the rage to help Customer Success and Sales scale and be a part of the next generation of CS and the future of work everywhere.
You can use AI to not only ensure you’re asking the ultimate question, but how the customer responds to it. This is data that you have never had before.
Find out if your customers will answer the ultimate question from your team. Next generation AI which is not only embedded entirely inside of Gainsight, but also the only Intelligent Engagement Platform available.
Thanks for stopping by our booth at Pulse last week! Our Pulse ONLY Special extends to the end of the month. $500 for 3 months to COACH or PREDICT.
Join the Revolution and use AI to Coach. Predict. Engage.
Bryan