Archived Success Plans for Premier Customers

Overview

At Gainsight, our CSM team was looking for the best way to track the accomplishment of Premier Plan deliverables within the Gainsight application. By using Success Plans, our CSM team is able to (1) report back to customers on what we delivered and when, and (2) ensure the team is able to keep track of what’s complete vs. outstanding. The Success Plan includes 8 high-level objectives and spans one year.
See below for details on how to set up a similar process in your own organization:

Preparation & Timing

• At the beginning of the quarter, the CSM meets with the customer to identify their most important adoption objectives. For more information on how Gainsight uses customer strategy meetings to develop Success Plans, refer to the blog post How We Use Success Plans to Achieve “Predictable Value Delivery”.
• CSM drafts the initial Success Plan, shares with the customer, and incorporates feedback.
• Success Plan is scheduled for completion by the end of the quarter.
• CSM schedules progress check-ins with customers (using regular CTAs) periodically during the quarter.
• (Optional) Create Playbooks for use with Success Plans. If your customers often have common goals for product adoption, it may be helpful to create Playbooks, and reduce the amount of manual task definition required of your CSM.

Admin Success Plan Configuration

To Configure Success Plan:

1. In Administration > Success Plan configuration, create a new Success Plan type. For example, we called the new plan type “Premier.”
2. In Administration > Success Plan > Objective Category, add categories as needed. In our example, we added categories for “Premier Deliverable” and “EBR.” 
3. Create a Success Plan template and apply it to the aforementioned Success Plan type. We called the template “Premier Package Deliverables.”

4. In the template, create Objectives. Example Objectives:


• 1 Train-the-Trainer Session for your team leaders
• Executive Business Review (1st Annual)
• Annual Risk Management Best Practice Session
• Annual Opportunities Best Practice Session
• Annual Lifecycle Best Practice Session
• Annual Dashboards Best Practice Session
• 1 CS Strategy Design Session on topic of your choice
• Executive Business Review (2nd annual)

5. Under each Objective, enter relevant tasks as needed, or let your CSMs create these per customer Success Plan as appropriate.
   For more detailed instructions on the above administrative steps, refer to the Configure Success Plans for the C360 article.

CSM Creates Customer Success Plan

After the Admin configures Success Plans, and the appropriate template, the CSM can create a Success Plan for a specific customer. Refer to the Create Success Plans in the C360/R360 article for details on how to build an individual customer’s Success Plan, including how to apply a template.

Sharing Success Plans with Customers

To share your Success Plan with internal users and/or People (External) through email, refer to the Share Success Plans article.

Success Plan Reporting

For assistance with building reports on Success Plan data, refer to the Reporting on Success Plans article.