[Customer Story] Gainsight: 1,000+ customer stories; 100+ G2 reviews

Gainsight, the heavyweight champ of customer success platforms, faced a dilemma: tons of customer love, but the signal data was flowing in 10+ different places, with no easy way to find the right advocates at the right time or turn them into usable stories.

Enter Tim Van Lew, the Director of Strategy with a plan.

Before Tim's magic touch, Gainsight's goldmine of customer kudos was buried a "mental rolodex". Sales and marketing were on a wild goose chase for customer success stories that, ironically, were hiding in plain sight within Gainsight's own data.

So what did Tim and Laudable do?

They rolled up their sleeves for a mid-2023 makeover, hoping to:

• Find all customer advocates in their base, not just the selective few they knew of and kept re-using.
• Hit coverage gaps to find customer proof and advocates for the newer products in the Gainsight platform.
• Match advocates and proof to the right opportunities based on product, use cases, company size and segment, and ROI achieved.
• Infuse hard metrics and results into all customer proof, to prove ROI and get sales to use what marketing creates.
• Launch fresh customer proof formats and content that prospects and customers would actually consume and find valuable.
• Making advocacy a win-win, showing customers the spotlight they deserve.

The game plan was simple yet effective:

1. Map out their listening posts - all the sources of signal that indicated a customer was likely an advocate. NPS scores, product outcomes, community vibes, and more.
2. Use Laudable wizardry to aggregate and analyze the treasure trove of signal data, creating an always on pipeline of customer proof with pre-drafted stories, and a giant pool of advocates.
3. Introduce an "ask early, ask often" strategy, snagging commitments when customers were most jazzed. For example, after a high NPS response or business outcome achievement, they’ll proactively ask customers if they’d like to share their story across different formats like a webinar, case study, and LinkedIn post.
4. Pre-draft customer stories and G2 reviews using Laudable AI - send customers Laudable drafts for case studies, G2 reviews, win slides - based on what they’ve told us in Gong calls to eliminate the “can we interview you for a story?” step.
5. Launched new customer proof formats and expanded a hidden gem - their customer spotlight webinar series. This gave customers a platform to share detailed stories of how they drove ROI with Gainsight.
6. Remix webinars into snackable social bites and insightful blog posts, spreading the good word far and wide. This multiplied the reach of each customer story, turning a single interview into 8+ pieces of content.
7. Give sales an armory of tailored, irresistible customer proofs, ready at a moment's notice - reducing the need for reactive last-minute reference requests
   

The results so far:

• 1,000+ auto-drafted customer stories
• 400% increase in customer advocacy participation (like G2 reviews!)
• Hundreds of new customer proof assets (like case studies and win slides)
• 5x faster time to story publishing and fewer project management tasks.
• Decrease time to match references by 80%+ and better reference matches
• Great feedback from sales on having relevant, proactive customer proofs to share with prospects
• Advocates are upleveling personal brand, getting promotions, and VIP treatment at events.

Tim and team didn't just revamp a program; they made a company-wide shift to lead with customer proof.

Tim summarized it perfectly with: “If that can happen in four months with a scrappy team that was just strung together, it’s incredible to see what will happen here.”