Case Study: Delphix & Gainsight
During Gainsight & Ecosystems’ webinar, How to Drive Net Revenue Retention (NRR) with Customer Value, Michael Plaskow, Chief Product Officer of Ecosystems, Easton Taylor, Vice President of Customer Success at Gainsight, and Todd Massey, Director of Customer Success Operations at Delphix discussed strategies to align sales and customer success around customer value. They shared how they’ve leveraged the partnership between Ecosystems, the leading Revenue Operating System built entirely on Customer Value, and Gainsight, the leading Customer Success platform, to:
- Engage customers around the value promised in presales
- Document customers’ desired business outcomes and KPIs
- Track the value solutions deliver in real-time
- Provide objective insights to retain must-keep customers
- Expand accounts to drive NRR
Here are the key insights you can apply in your own organization. You can also download the full webinar recording here.
Delphix
At Delphix, the executive leadership team sought to boost Net Revenue Retention (NRR) by quantifying and driving customer value at every step along the customer journey. Prior to tapping the combined power of Ecosystems and Gainsight, each department was using different approaches to value. Todd Massey noted,
“We started with a bit of a tribal or fragmented approach, one of the things that we found was [that] we actually needed a solution–a single source or a tool that allowed us to combine those efforts and that is definitely where Ecosystems came in for us. Itt allowed us to align around where we were going to start putting the information that we had right instead of having three different places or four different places people were storing things.”
With its end-to-end Revenue OS, Ecosystems allowed Delphix to consolidate all relevant customer data and make it directly accessible by the sales team via Salesforce, customer success via Gainsight, and directly by customers themselves via a stand-alone portal.
Recognizing that the customer value journey starts very early in the purchase journey, Delphix formulated a four-step approach to creating deeply meaningful value-based customer relationships:
- First, their field sales team utilizes Ecosystems Revenue OS to figure out customers’ primary pain points. To that end, Ecosystems includes a discovery module organized by industries, competition, and more to help the sales team understand common struggles and ask the right questions to be a trusted advisor to the customer.
- Second, the sales team identifies and quantifies with the customer what eliminating that pain would do for their organization.
- This analysis then leads Delphix sellers to the solution best aligned with the customers’ needs. The Ecosystems Revenue OS suggests best practice KPIs to allow both Delphix and their customers to track solution performance against an agreed-up set of discrete metrics.
- The fourth step in their sales process is to then translate those results into actual financial business results, which can be tracked ongoing by customer success.
The desired business outcomes, proposed solutions, value to be delivered, and KPIs are all documented in the presales Value Assessment within Ecosystems Revenue OS and Salesforce. The customer also has ongoing, real-time collaborative access to the business case to edit, test competing scenarios, and share internally.
After the sale, the handoff to Delphix’s customer success team occurs automatically from the Ecosystems Revenue OS in Salesforce to the Gainsight platform, ensuring that CS is aware of the customer’s goals from Day 1.
Finally, during the value realization process, the value actually being delivered is quantified and tracked ongoing, compared against the KPIs that were agreed upon during the sales process. As a result, the Delphix CS team is able to uncover hidden value along the way–value that the customer is getting from the purchase that they did not anticipate–which helps Delphix retain and grow accounts. Todd Massey explained:
“It starts with using Ecosystems very early in the customer journey to capture the customer’s current state and what they believe will be their future state. Then that’s handed off to our customer success team to continue to drive through that value so that the customer is getting not only what they want today, but hopefully along the way uncovering hidden value or value that maybe wasn’t part of the original sales cycle. For us, that handoff is really important using a shared tool.”
By aligning sales and customer success around customer value, leveraging the capabilities of Ecosystems Revenue OS and Gainsight, and consistently tracking and delivering value to customers, organizations can enhance NRR and drive long-term customer satisfaction and growth.
Want to drive increased NRR at your organization? Learn more about Ecosystems/Gainsight integration here or contact us to speak with a member of our team.
