SaaStr 264: Gainsight COO Allison Pickens on Why Customer Success and Product Management Are The New Sales and Marketing, How To Approach Building and Scaling "Services" As A Revenue Line & How To Build A CS Team On A Tight Budget
Allison Pickens, COO at Gainsight, discusses the importance of strategic planning in customer success, the alignment of customer success and product management, and strategies for building a CS team on a tight budget. She also highlights the growing importance of product marketing and customer success in driving sales and marketing.
33:09
forum Ask episode
web_stories AI Snips
view_agenda Chapters
auto_awesome Transcript
info_circle Episode notes
insights INSIGHT
Product And CS Are A New Go‑To‑Market Pair
Product management and customer success must be tightly coupled like sales and marketing used to be.
CS supplies situational customer insights and product turns those into system-level solutions.
insights INSIGHT
Don't Let CS Mask Product Flaws
Overly heroic CS can hide product gaps by creating one-off fixes.
Great CSMs should relay scalable feedback to product rather than own unscalable solutions.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Deliver Help In‑Product, Not Just Slides
Put help and education where users work by using in‑app walkthroughs and context-sensitive content.
Use online communities and knowledge bases, but prioritize in‑product guidance for scale.
Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode
Allison Pickens is the COO @ Gainsight, the company that provides everything you need to turn your customers into your biggest growth engine. To date Gainsight have raised over $184m from some of the world's best VCs in the form of Lightspeed, Bessemer, Insight Venture Partners, Battery Ventures and Salesforce Ventures just to name a few. As for Allison, in her 5 years at Gainsight her list of achievements in endless from running all functions that drive value for Gainsight customers, now a 150 person team, to building out the corporate development function to being the right hand to the CEO. Allison is also an Entrepreneur-In-Residence at Bessemer Venture Partners and sits on the board of RainforestQA. Before Gainsight, Allison started her career in NYC with stints at Bain and The Boston Consulting Group.
In Today's Episode We Discuss:
How Allison made her way into the world of SaaS with Gainsight from her start in finance at Bain in New York?
What does a strategic plan really mean to Allison? What is included in it? How should it be structured? In terms of ambition, how does one set ambitious enough plans to be a stretch but not a stretch too far? How does one tie their strategic plan to their financial plan? What is the right way to communicate this throughout the organisation?
Why does Allison believe product marketing and customer success are the new sales and marketing? What have been Allison's biggest lessons on how to effectively measure adoption? Who is accountable to this number? CS or product management? Does Allison believe that marketing needs to be held accountable to a number directly tied to revenue?
How does Allsion respond to the common negative of "services revenue"? What is an acceptable ratio of services to software revenue? How can one approach setting up a services team for scale? Why is having such a great CS team actually bad for product development in the long run? How can one mitigate this?
Allison's 60 Second SaaStr:
What does Allison know now that she wishes she had known at the beginning of her time with Gainsight?
How often should CS check in with their customers? What does that look like?
If on a tight budget, how should one staff a CS team?
The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors