How to Protect Your Customer Base in an Economic Downturn

00;00;12;26 – 00;00;37;12
Speaker 1
Welcome everybody to episode three of the Race to Revenue. I am joined today very excited to be joined today by Kelly Capote CO at Gaines site. And we are talking about probably the most important topic that I think is on every single revenue leader’s mind right now, which is how to protect your customer base. Important always, but especially important in an economic downturn.

00;00;37;17 – 00;00;48;05
Speaker 1
And who better to talk to us than the company that pioneered customer success and the person who leads that function again? INSIGHT Welcome. KELLY It’s a pleasure. Great to be here.

00;00;48;25 – 00;01;04;19
Speaker 2
Absolutely. So excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Kyle and I could not be more excited about this topic. It’s, as you can imagine, very, very top of mind for me, both with my organization and and helping others in the space of customer success.

00;01;05;04 – 00;01;15;06
Speaker 1
Wonderful. Wonderful. So on that note, actually, I think most people are probably familiar with Gainsay, but give us the 32nd overview. What what is Gainsay do how would you explain it to somebody who’s never heard about it?

00;01;15;17 – 00;01;54;10
Speaker 2
Yeah, great question. So the oversimplified answer is gainsay our platform helps our customers drive better outcomes for their customers. So it’s a customer success management software that allows you to not only drive, you have a single source of truth of your customer drive, workflow, orchestration, integrated journeys both human led and digital led. Understand the usage and behavior. So that way you’re constantly being proactive and as strategic as possible to drive outcomes for your customers, which obviously in terms to drive better growth for your organization.

00;01;54;28 – 00;02;02;16
Speaker 1
Wonderful. Love that and your role. Chief Customer Officer you’ve been at the inside for close to six years now. I think about six years.

00;02;02;21 – 00;02;03;10
Speaker 2
Spot on.

00;02;03;21 – 00;02;21;16
Speaker 1
Okay, awesome. That’s amazing. And prior to that, you’ve had all sorts of selling roles. You’ve had pre-sales roles, you’ve had post sales roles, and now you find yourself as a chief customer officer. What exactly does that mean and how has your background through all these other revenue functions prepared you for this CTO role?

00;02;21;27 – 00;02;51;05
Speaker 2
Yeah, that’s a great question. So I’ll start with like what is my role mean? And then I’ll I’ll explain to you like very briefly my journey and why I went in this direction, because I think there is a lot of connective tissue across the various revenue functions within organizations. So Chief Customer Officer I hate using the term quite frankly pre sales and profit post sales because I do think that in these days we need to appreciate as kind of one go to market engine.

00;02;51;15 – 00;03;17;09
Speaker 2
But functionally sometimes it’s the easiest way to distinguish between the different parts of the business. So my organization, I have four core pillars. I have our CSM organization. So those are your customer success managers who are there taking care of your customers, helping drive them to their desired business outcomes. On a on a regular basis, I have our support organizations.

00;03;17;09 – 00;03;53;14
Speaker 2
So managing tickets, you know, making sure that we’re, we’re kind of on top of any issues they might bump into our professional services organizations to onboard our customers and manage services to accelerate time to value and additional outcomes. And then I also have a centralized ops scale and experience org that does a bunch of different things. So pretty much anything after the point of sale, once they’ve signed the contract get shifted over to my organization for the for the longevity of their the relationship with the insight one.

00;03;54;16 – 00;04;15;26
Speaker 2
Yeah. So and then I guess going back to like the second part of your question, you’re absolutely right. My career was born more out of your traditional sales capacity. I was a sales girl, you know, kind of through and through early days in my career, I think what I personally learned over time. So I was more on the hunting side to begin with.

00;04;15;26 – 00;04;41;10
Speaker 2
Then I found myself evolving into more of like account management, partner management, and then before I officially had a customer success title, quite frankly, I was doing a lot of the same things that we do in customer success today. We just are pointing it that at the organizations I was at. But what I learned is I didn’t enjoy the transactional side of selling that much.

00;04;41;10 – 00;05;10;10
Speaker 2
I enjoyed building and fostering those long term relationships, understanding what their business goals were and really kind of, you know, rolling up my sleeves and helping them get there and then maturing those goals over time. So I think my strengths combined with also just thinking about, you know, business context in the way that we’re evolving to recurring revenue models like this whole idea of customer success was super appealing to me.

00;05;10;10 – 00;05;34;05
Speaker 2
It made a lot of business sense. I saw the writing on the wall, so understanding my strengths and what energized me is how I landed at game site. And it’s been an awesome, you know, six year journey. I’ve spent the entire to the entirety of my career in customer success at game, but kind of growing and scaling different teams and organizations and going on year to year here soon in the CO role.

00;05;34;29 – 00;05;50;13
Speaker 1
Wonderful. Thank you so much and super interesting. And it’s funny how that happens, Kelly, where you have this passion for customer education and customer enablement and you want to align with their strategic initiatives. And that’s just kind of the way you operate. And the thought it now becomes your career.

00;05;52;24 – 00;06;21;03
Speaker 2
Too, though, because kind of going back to the revenue roll piece, there’s so much of what we do in customer success. I think the good news customer success, broadly speaking, is now appreciated as a growth engine for your business. It’s not what people understood it to be five years ago, it’s just this churn mitigation team, right? Firefighting, etc. Like we understand if we take care of our customers, they’re going to stay with us, they’re going to grow with us, they’re going to advocate for us.

00;06;21;14 – 00;06;46;13
Speaker 2
So a lot of the skill sets and the types of things that I learned in my sales days, right, of the Challenger sale and value propositions and objective handling and negotiation, all these things they play out really well in the in the customer success world. And quite frankly, we do a lot of the same training across success and sales for that reason, the initial sales, just the first sale.

00;06;46;17 – 00;07;07;16
Speaker 2
And now we need to understand and think about the customer journey as really a continuous extension of that sales cycle. I always say if customers aren’t growing, they’re likely on the path to churn. So getting organizations to embrace that mindset really helps you think about like how these teams would work together and just the direction we need to take them in.

00;07;08;08 – 00;07;32;16
Speaker 1
If customers are growing, they’re on the path to churn. That is a wonderful sentiment and a really good segue into the topic for today. And then, you know, the economic downturn and you mentioned another thing you’re telling, which is that your customer base at more and more companies, mostly, you know, in large part because of insight, are thinking about their customer base as the growth engine, as a possible growth engine for the company.

00;07;32;23 – 00;07;52;27
Speaker 1
And so you know, protecting the base and thinking about your customers as a growth engine from a revenue standpoint is always important. And again, that’s been on a mission to make sure that every company is seeing that as mission critical. That macro environment is forcing companies to view this as a mission critical way of of growing revenue, but also treating customers well.

00;07;53;06 – 00;08;11;00
Speaker 1
So how how do you protect the customer base right now when budgets are getting slashed or budgets are frozen or competitors are offering consolidation plans and cutting costs? And like talk to us about some of the strategies that you employ and that you’re teaching your customers to employ.

00;08;11;10 – 00;08;30;29
Speaker 2
Yeah, absolutely. And I think you you set up the backdrop of sort of what’s going on really, really well. In many ways. I feel like I’m having deja vu, too, like when COVID first hit it. And I think that that was a catalyst for folks really starting to understand customer success and just the appreciation that we always need to have for our installed base.

00;08;30;29 – 00;09;09;18
Speaker 2
And we’re kind of on phase two of that now. So in terms of like what do we do right? I think you’re spot on like the customer base to pretty much all organizations couldn’t be more important now like than any other point in time. So we’ve introduced what we call the durable growth playbook and the whole notion of this is and I’d like to start by saying this isn’t just a point in time strategy, quite frankly, it comprises the six core tenets or strategies in terms of what we think organizations should be focused on to ride this growth roller coaster.

00;09;09;18 – 00;09;29;13
Speaker 2
We’ve seen it play out the last three years. It was bad, then it went up and then it’s down. And if you really embrace these six core tenets, you will come out on the right side and really drive to what we call durable growth for long term success. So the six key components, I’ll share them and then we can probably, you know, dig into a few as we go.

00;09;29;13 – 00;10;00;00
Speaker 2
But number one, we say like no surprise. That’s all grounded in you need to have a really tight risk management program and ideally predictive type of health scoring that serves as your early warning signal in your business. And Nick and I are CEO. We’re like, this is pretty much stable stakes for SAS companies. Like if if you’re not doing this, that’s a fundamental problem because that’s how your business operates in a recurring in a recurring way.

00;10;00;11 – 00;10;19;18
Speaker 1
I want to I want to double down on this. Yeah, there are five more. So sorry for jumping the gun. Look at this. It’s important because so many revenue leaders are hyper focused on this concept of health scoring and predictive scoring for new logo pursuits. And then as soon as something becomes a customer like, All right, my work here is done.

00;10;19;25 – 00;10;20;10
Speaker 2
With.

00;10;21;01 – 00;10;40;09
Speaker 1
The same rigor, the same strategy, the same concept has to be applied to your customer business so that you can keep your eyes on the prize and understand where is their deal risk? Where is their account risk, where is the momentum? And your point about no surprises I think is a really good wrap for them. Sorry to interject.

00;10;40;15 – 00;11;01;26
Speaker 2
Well, actually, I think it’s a really relevant point. I’m glad you bring it up, because, number one, you have to have a data driven way to do this, right? Otherwise, it’s kind of like put pointing your finger in the air, but it goes back to customer success, operating with the same level of operational excellence that sales organizations have grown up to know and understand.

00;11;01;26 – 00;11;23;20
Speaker 2
And there’s just a standardized way of measuring, tracking and doing things. And we’re starting to see that inflection point in customer success. I was like, Say, where we make it less squishy and you’ve really got to understand the data, use that to guide your high value activities that you’re doing. Drive that to your leading and lagging outcomes. So I think it’s actually a really good point.

00;11;23;20 – 00;11;25;11
Speaker 2
I’m glad you double clicked into it.

00;11;25;11 – 00;11;46;17
Speaker 1
And it’s a false choice to say that it’s either you have to choose between customer love and supporting your customers and implementing this kind of standardization and measurement and tracking and rigor. Those two things are not opposites sides. That’s different sides of the same coin that leads to customer success. So I’m really happy to call that.

00;11;46;17 – 00;12;09;19
Speaker 2
Exactly, yeah. There. So I feel like folks get caught up in like process and data and they think it’s like a bad thing. It’s a bad thing. This is how we like this is how you have less wasted effort and you really understand what are the right things that are yielding the largest return for your effort and being able to use that to then inform different things that you might want to roll out and strategies for the business.

00;12;09;19 – 00;12;12;28
Speaker 1
I love that. Okay, so I interrupted you. You’re on Hillary.

00;12;12;28 – 00;12;33;18
Speaker 2
Yeah. I will quickly go to these and then you can kind of click into anything that you want to know. No surprises. The second one is keep your customer and customer success. So this is one of the big shifts, right? I think early days, we all naturally tend to gravitate towards looking at things from an inside out view, like what are our metrics and what are we doing?

00;12;33;18 – 00;12;56;27
Speaker 2
But really taking that outside in approach, understanding what the customers are trying to do. So this notion of outcomes right, and understanding what are their business goals and raising elevating the level of conversation. So it’s not just about feature functionality and adoption. That’s great. But at the end of their we solving the business needs and the challenges that they’re trying to do with your software.

00;12;57;14 – 00;13;27;02
Speaker 2
So leaning into outcome aims across the entire journey from sales to success and leveraging things like community to bring your customers together, share knowledge, feedback, that’s I think increasingly becoming more important. So that’s the second one. The third one is one of my favorite, which is scaling through digital. So this notion of digital customer success is really blowing up.

00;13;27;02 – 00;13;50;12
Speaker 2
I actually think it’s the next frontier of customer success. We’ve learned a lot with how to, you know, make our customers successful with human led capital strategies. But things are changing number one. You know, given the macroeconomic landscape we’re operating within, we can’t just continue to throw bodies at things in a linear basis. We’ve got to drive towards profitability and growth.

00;13;50;21 – 00;14;19;17
Speaker 2
Number two, technology is evolving, right? We have more technology, our fingertips to do some really cool personal wise things given AI and, you know, conversational AI and behavior. And then number three, the way our end users want to consume software, especially by persona, is different and they very often want it to be more self-serve and tailored to their specific needs and maturity, etc..

00;14;19;26 – 00;14;40;28
Speaker 2
So leveraging more digital. And then the fourth one is like growing through your products. So leveraging more digital and product led strategy is going to continue to become important. The last one I’ll touch on is just what we call go on offense. So I do want to I do want to take a moment because I think there’s a lot of doom and gloom out there right now.

00;14;41;18 – 00;15;08;03
Speaker 2
But a lot of organizations, as we think about the install base and as as businesses are planning for their next fiscal years, even the makeup of new logo acquisition and expansion dollars like the mix might be shifting. They might realize that, you know, new logo acquisition, that growth rate might slow. So we got to go figure out how we bring, you know, how we elevate the percentage of expansion dollars that we’re getting from our base.

00;15;08;03 – 00;15;29;06
Speaker 2
So go on. Offense is all about how is your sales and success teams collaborating and coming up with integrated plans to understand the whitespace, understand what your customers are trying to do. Are there things, as CFOs are looking at text, at consolidation that you can proactively get ahead of and even make your your platform more sticky for the long term?

00;15;29;06 – 00;15;41;00
Speaker 2
So taking a very proactive view in terms of expansion and not just getting so stuck in, we got to save our customers, but also make sure that you’re optimizing for both both sides of the coin.

00;15;41;10 – 00;15;47;26
Speaker 1
I love that. So you hit on four of the six pillars of this durable growth playbook. If people are interested, where can they find the full playbook?

00;15;48;07 – 00;16;10;16
Speaker 2
Yeah. So if you go to gain sites website, I have actually been doing a whole series on this. So we’ve we’ve done five of the six strategies, we’ve we’ve introduced the playbook and then we kind of do a double click into each strategy. We’ve gone through five of the six. If you if you just go to Insights website and look for durable growth playbook, you’ll be able to access the whole series.

00;16;10;26 – 00;16;32;14
Speaker 1
I am doing that right after this. Thank you very much. So a lot of what you’re talking about, Kelly, is sniffing out and solving what we at clerical revenue leak. And revenue is revenue that you’ve earned but you just haven’t yet captured. And this is especially true in the customer business where they’re already your customer accounts. Now, how do you shore up that renewal or how do you get that expansion or how do you do these things?

00;16;32;23 – 00;16;55;07
Speaker 1
And a lot of what you’re talking about, the six pillars that you’ve outlined in this growth playbook probably are born, I’m guessing from some personal experience. So I’m curious if you can tell us a story about where you you identified this potential revenue leak and then you implemented portion of the playbook or maybe the whole playbook. Yeah. All of that week.

00;16;55;07 – 00;16;56;01
Speaker 1
How did you approach that?

00;16;56;11 – 00;17;22;19
Speaker 2
Yeah, I’ll share a few like tactical strategies, like real world examples that I think will help contextualize what I mean by some of these durable growth playbook initiatives. So we’ll start with kind of the no surprises that one. And actually COVID was a big accelerator even for us internally against it, we realized like decisions are going to be happening quickly.

00;17;22;19 – 00;17;57;00
Speaker 2
How are we all hands on deck, like looking at every little detail, using that to drive programmatic plays and outreaches and programs. So having a risk of risk process where you’re inspecting the health of your business every single week is really, really important. So again, say like instead of just having one big risk meeting, one potential action that you all could think about doing is across your success organization, I imagine you have different segmentation tiers.

00;17;57;15 – 00;18;27;27
Speaker 2
We sort of amped up the level of rigor around our risk escalation process, and each segment we’ll have a weekly call. We’re leveraging health score and we’re going through those updates and creating playbooks to kind of drive them forward. And that made a really big difference in terms of not just retention, but also through those conversations. A lot of times saving a customer actually can turn into expansion because you’re solving a business need.

00;18;27;28 – 00;18;54;23
Speaker 2
So as long as you’re anchoring it back around, business needs, very often you’re uncovering expansion potential as well. I think one of the most relevant things that we’ve done at gain site, so a few years back, kind of going back to I like to say adoption is necessary, but it’s not sufficient. We put a stake in the ground and said, okay, we’ve got to elevate the level of conversation we’re having with our customers.

00;18;54;23 – 00;19;13;29
Speaker 2
Because the problem statement was right. Yes, they might be using the platform game site. You can do a lot of different things with it. But are we focused on the right things that are going to solve that business need? So we said adoption is great, but we’re going to start to measure even our organization on this notion of verified outcomes.

00;19;14;10 – 00;19;40;14
Speaker 2
So what that meant was enabling them on the core set of usually business goals or challenges. This was like our first path, like first step into our value kind of journey that we use with our customers. And they needed to identify, like, what are we trying to do, create a success plan with OC? Like, for example, let’s say we’re tensions and issues, so we’re going to go build out really great risk management process and gain site.

00;19;40;22 – 00;20;00;11
Speaker 2
How are we going to measure that? Where are you at today? What’s the success criteria? And then coming full circle, say, okay, we did indeed move the needle on that. It’s this notion of a verified outcome and we actually changed their variable compensation not to just be adoption based but like to be more so what like what impact are we having on the customer?

00;20;01;08 – 00;20;25;07
Speaker 2
You wouldn’t believe how massive that is. So I’ll tell you, when we first did it, we did some regression analysis in customers that had a verified outcome versus customers who did it had a 20% higher retention rate. So I wanted to share that because I think that’s what we’re seeing, especially in these economic conditions, just usage is not going to be good enough.

00;20;25;23 – 00;20;48;15
Speaker 2
You have like more senior level folks looking at your software and technology and they’re going, okay, why are we spending this much and you have a bullet proof ROI story to support it. So if you’re not if you don’t have something like that in place, you know, a risk process and starting to really speak in the language of outcomes across your organization and a way to measure it are the two.

00;20;48;22 – 00;20;50;05
Speaker 2
Those would be the two things I would do.

00;20;50;05 – 00;21;01;00
Speaker 1
First, that that’s amazing. And the way that I think I can frame this as a summary is you need to go from being perceived as a vendor to being perceived as a true partner.

00;21;01;02 – 00;21;01;19
Speaker 2
Yes.

00;21;01;22 – 00;21;16;28
Speaker 1
Sans the strategic initiatives who’s tying your software, your product solution, whatever it is to being in service of those initiatives that especially the executive team is driving. Otherwise you’re just going to be another piece of tech.

00;21;17;04 – 00;21;17;21
Speaker 2
Exactly.

00;21;17;21 – 00;21;26;13
Speaker 1
One understand, especially the executives don’t understand the strategic outcomes that you’re able to help drive for them across all levels of the business.

00;21;26;24 – 00;21;50;04
Speaker 2
So well said. And if you’re not connected with those higher levels, now is the time to get executive sponsor program in place and start getting to those levels because decision making decisions are being made often at a level above even some of our day to day contacts. So that would be the third key thing I would deploy and decisions are happening now.

00;21;50;04 – 00;22;01;21
Speaker 2
So you need to go out, you know, even if the renewals not for six, six or nine months, get in front of that, have the conversations before those budget decisions are finalized, you don’t have a runway to influence it.

00;22;02;01 – 00;22;23;27
Speaker 1
This isn’t super important shift, I think, in customer success. And again, one that you absolutely have to take advantage of right now in this current climate to show that your solution is mission critical, that the shift is it’s not just about customer education. It’s about ensuring that you show the company, you show the people that you understand what they’re trying to do and to your solution to helping them do that.

00;22;24;01 – 00;22;36;12
Speaker 1
So the question for you, Kelly, is how do you train your systems? How do you train your team to go and uncover these outcomes, these verified outcomes, as you’re talking about? How do they know what’s top of mind for executives?

00;22;36;12 – 00;23;00;16
Speaker 2
Yeah, so we’ve gone through about three iterations of this. And so there is like a crawl, walk, run approach to this, in my opinion, we call it and and we call it operationalizing outcomes is sort of what we call it, a key insight, and it’s end to end. So the first version, like I said, was a few years ago and we were like, okay, we just got to take the first step, put a stake in the ground.

00;23;00;24 – 00;23;21;25
Speaker 2
And so we started very basic. And we, you know, you have to run of data just from working on customers where you can come together and say, hey, at the end of the day, we know our software is usually solving these six challenges, right? So we had the groundswell in the success organization. We built a few slides, right, that they could use in their hours or conversations with.

00;23;21;25 – 00;23;45;19
Speaker 2
These are the six things which ones you care about, helping them understand how to get a baseline metric and track it. So just start small, do some education, do some role playing, and the real way to change behavior, in my opinion, is by incentivization. So that’s why we also shifted our plan to make sure that we were all in and it worked great.

00;23;45;19 – 00;24;13;13
Speaker 2
So then the second phase of this was like, okay, it’s great that customer success is doing this, but like this needs to we need to make sure we have the same language that starts and sales flow through onboarding. And then really it should be more of a validation exercise for customer success. So then we created that’s actually where this whole operationalizing outcomes, that’s when we named it Operationalizing Outcomes, and it was a Tiger team of people across the organization.

00;24;13;13 – 00;24;36;22
Speaker 2
It became more robust in terms of use cases and there’s maturity levels within use cases and it all built sales team has to put certain things into the opportunity object before they can close it. It feeds the success plan and gains that. So this is really where it was operationalized end to end. And then the third version for us is we, you know, we’ve done some acquisitions, we’ve become more multiproduct.

00;24;36;22 – 00;25;03;00
Speaker 2
So you have to have sort of a flexible architecture to be able to fold new products into it. So that’s the journey we’ve been on this past year. But it’s a library basically where they start at the high level, where their goal or like what are what are they trying to do? There’s three goals per outcome and then there’s use cases underneath of it and we’ve made it almost like a plug and play type of thing so that they can help guide the customer on that journey.

00;25;03;16 – 00;25;28;01
Speaker 1
That’s amazing how in super, super mature and a really nice Senate crawl walk run playbook for for people to implement as well. I want to hit on a point to that. You talked about, which is the same language that your AI’s, your presales sellers are using through onboarding, through Synapse because that handoff from presales to Post-Sales and I know you don’t like that distinction, but that handoff is a major area of revenue week.

00;25;28;01 – 00;25;47;13
Speaker 1
There’s so much that’s not transferred or collaboration that’s not happening or anything like that. So what are what are your tips that can bring this to life and make sure that all of these different revenue critical employees on both sides of the divide are actually working together and collaborating in a way that helps make this a seamless journey for your customers.

00;25;47;27 – 00;26;08;03
Speaker 2
Yeah, the baton passes are always the most friction filled areas of the journey, as I like to call it. And let’s be honest, there’s going to be some change management that has to happen when you do this. I was a salesperson so I can speak, you know, out of my my own experience. You know, they want to get the strength.

00;26;08;04 – 00;26;34;04
Speaker 2
They want to get that deal done and they want to move on. So when it becomes whatever you ask them to do, more data capture, it’s usually not received with with open arms, but the way that we actually found it, what helped us is because we sort of did like V1 of this in success. We created this library of like we actually push them out to slack.

00;26;34;04 – 00;26;53;01
Speaker 2
So whenever we get a verified outcomes, it goes to slack for people to see. We have a dashboard and like sales eyes and ears is like lit up. Like this is pure gold for me. I have these stories that I can use to go bring more deals in. It’s providing rich benchmark, taking all of these things. So that was like the light bulb moment.

00;26;53;13 – 00;27;21;06
Speaker 2
So having sort of that footprint to build off of really help this. Now we again you have to have a Tiger team so you have to have an owner across the functions that are really held responsible for this. I would even go as far as saying like it should be a company level a priority with CEO support down if you want to do this right and there’s different people held accountable across the the different functions and they have, you know, committee meetings, etc..

00;27;21;15 – 00;27;52;07
Speaker 2
And then you share successes. You share, you know, there’s got to be inspection when it’s not working and you have to have guardrails like literally in the opportunity object, like, nope, you have to have their highest priority, you know, desired outcome log or you can’t move that forward at the end of the day once they see the, the fruits of their labor and what it can yield in terms of dollars and money in their pocket, then, you know, it’s accelerating expansion deals like that’s where we’ve come back and said, hey, we’ve actually done analysis.

00;27;52;07 – 00;28;06;18
Speaker 2
When we have X amount of outcomes identified in the sales process, we’re actually increasing expansion faster, the deals are bigger. So being able again to go back into the data and show them why that really gets them going.

00;28;07;02 – 00;28;24;06
Speaker 1
Amazing. Thank you so much. We are amazingly already out of time. It flew by again. I want to include the durable growth playbook for game site. That sounds fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing the wisdom. Thank you for all the thoughts and ideas. Really appreciate it. And that’s a wrap for this episode of having you.

00;28;24;09 – 00;28;27;06
Speaker 2
Kyle, this is fun. Takes us by.