Success Plans are valuable tools for CSMs to identify and work toward specific goals and objectives with their customers. This article walks Admins through an example Success Plan, focused on improving your customer’s adoption of your product. We’ve kept the details fairly generic, so that you can apply it to your particular product or service.

In this example, the customer we’re creating this Success Plan for completed their implementation, and they’re interested in rolling out additional features, expanding product usage to other teams, and employing more of our best practices. We consider this customer high touch, primarily because of their relationship with our organization and their level of engagement with us.

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 end of quarter.

  • CSM schedules progress check-ins with customer (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

Admin Success Plan Configuration
  1. In Administration > Success Plan Configuration, create a Success Plan type called “Customer Objectives & ROI.”

  2. Under Objective Categories, enter the high level reasons for the objectives. In this example, we used categories that connect to our ROI Framework, such as: Optimize Customer Operations, Drive Customer Expansion, Identify Customer Risk, and manage Customer Lifecycle. (Each objective in the Success Plan will be tied to an objective category.)

  3. Create a Success Plan template called “Adoption Success Plan,” and apply it to the aforementioned Success Plan type.

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

    • Scale customer communications program

    • Rollout product to additional teams

    • Improve Dashboards

    • Provide feedback to product team

5. Under each Objective, enter the appropriate tasks. See image below for example Tasks:

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Refer Configure Success Plans for the C360 for more details on these administrative steps.

CSM Creates Customer Success Plan

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

Sharing Success Plans with Customers

Refer the article Exporting Success Plans for details on how to export Success Plans into a corporate branded Powerpoint presentation.