[Customer Success Leader] Using Gong For Risk Management and Launching Strategic Initiatives

Devon Kirschmann: Hello Gongsters. My name is Devon Kirschmann and I'm a manager on our mid- market customer success team. I know I'm supposed to share a fun fact, but frankly, that gives me first day of school anxiety vibes. So I'll just tell you that my life is consumed by my precious French bulldog Remy. If you listen closely, you might actually hear her snore during this call. She's way more fun to, and I am. And if you ever need a pick me up, just ping me on Slack and I'll send you some picks. The superpower that Gong gives me is x- ray vision. I know that sounds cheesy, but what I mean by that is that with Gong, I can see through the noise and the fluff to quickly identify risk, arm myself, with the right context and game plan with my team. In a hyper growth environment with scalability as our north star, it's critical to ensure that we have, that we operate with efficiency. This means removing redundancy, having more impactful meetings and ensuring that milestones with our customers are focused on moving them forward in their maturity. So there's three themes I want to highlight today. So one is leveraging Gong to have more impactful one- on- ones. So with the CSMs on my team, instead of having, he said, she said conversation, I can quickly get up to speed on where an account stands and focus my one on ones on the path forward versus reflecting on the past. Two, leveraging tools, harmoniously without duplicating efforts. As a CS org, we heavily use Gainsight to identify based on health and to flag officially. But with Gong, I can actually validate that and catch any potential blind spots. So Gainsight tells me the who and the why, Gong tells me the what and the how. And lastly, focusing on quality versus quantity. This means ensuring that our CSMs are having the right touch points with customers, focusing on milestones that will move them up into the right versus having more excessive touchpoints than need be. So I'm going to walk you through two specific workflows that I use in Gong. So the first I'm going to focus on is risk validation. So let me go ahead and share my screen. So when it comes to risk, as I mentioned before, typically that's raised and flagged in Gainsight, but what I'll typically do from there before even talking to the one on one is just do a few... Do my due diligence in Gong. So what I'll typically do is live in the account page here, and there's two big things that I look out for. Number one, what does our exec sponsorship or leadership alignment look like? Number two, have we held a business review? The reason I focus in on the business review is because that touchpoint in particular is where we validate ROI. We ensure that we're aligned on their next strategic priority focus, and also it's our chance to showcase some insights for our customers. So it's really that make or break event, are we on the right track? So the first thing I'll do just right off the bat, to me, this looks like we're in good contact, but again, it's more about the quality of the contacts versus just being in contact. So I'm first just going to type in business review. As a CS team, we've been pretty strict about making sure that our title, the titles of our calls are consistent because we don't use opportunity stages. So that's a big one. So from here, I'm just going to quickly do a pulse check. And again, I'm looking for calls specifically, so there's some discussion on business reviews and then I see it here. So I notice right off the bat, we haven't had one since June, so typically we do them twice a year. So we're already, we're almost six months away from the last one. So potentially going into my one- on- one now, I have in the back of my mind, I'll ask about a business review. From there. I'll also just take a look at who we're talking to. So here just quickly I can see again, we've got a lot of contacts. They're definitely multi- threaded we're with moment, looks like we've got some sales ops folks in here, some director levels, but maybe what I want to focus in on is specifically our sales leaders, those stakeholders are our bread and butter. So I'm going to search here for BP and I can see we've got quite a few. So I might just tag a few of them, not all of them, just to sort of see what the landscape looks like. I'll choose Jim, and then maybe Matthew and Mike. So just a handful of those folks. And I can just, just even in taking a peek here, we've got some passive communication. So now instead of going in blind to this account, I can understand why the CSM potentially raises this as a flag, but I also know what's actually happening. So it just makes my one on one stronger and I don't have to waste time going back. They don't have to go back and dig. I don't have to go back and dig. I've got what I need. So this is again how I use it for just validating the risk that exists today, and also potentially finding some areas of opportunity that we can immediately start executing following this risk flag. The second workflow I'm going to take you through is how we actually launched a strategic initiative. So in the spring, we decided to officially launch what we called our adopt process. And all this did was we created three new touch points and then updated one touchpoint, which was our business review. So right off the gate, we knew that we're launching four new milestones for our CS team to understand. So what's the best way to do that. So the first thing we did was we created a certification path and what we did there was we just created some scorecards around what are the key components to those milestones. We had each person record a certification with their peer and make sure that they're titling those milestones correctly, as you can see here. And then we certified them. Once they were certified. We knew as a leadership team and an enablement team, well, now we need to understand what are those good examples so that if we are coaching, we actually have some good, solid, real examples that folks could listen back onto and for future onboarding. So once we certified all of our CSM, and when they started doing these touchpoints live with customers, we went ahead and created a library. So you can see in our adopt process, we have each stage here, strategic partnership, adoption, and rollout in business review. From there, we started just plugging the examples. We actually held a spiff to create excitement around this launch, and then selfishly, of course, so that we could pluck those really great examples and have them for ongoing enablement and learning. And then last but not least, part of launching a strategic initiative is understanding what impact is it having? Is it working? And so we can also just spot check in Gong to highlight some of those early successes. So one of the big things that we did, there was a really strong emphasis on showcasing insights within a business review, making sure that we're doing a give and get with our customers. So right off the bat here, if I'm just spot checking my team, I'm understanding I search for insights within a business review for my team. And you can see that here's a significant increase in insights being brought up that is directly tied to when we launched this initiative. So when it comes to, as a frontline manager, when it comes to showcasing, is this working to leaders? I can literally just take a screenshot and show yes, over time, we've consistently seen this gone up. So it's a really nice way to sort of bring an initiative full circle. And also all of this is at the CSMs disposal as well, if they need to continue learning from their peers. So those are two main workflows that I use within Gong. So just to recap, it's using Gong to validate the risk that we're seeing and ensure that we're not missing anything else. So taking away or understanding what our blind spots are, and also helping to inform what the strategy is going forward. And second, to actually roll out a strategic initiative within a fast growing team and quickly launch it and validate that it's working. Thanks for listening.