Top 5 Customer Success Trends for 2018

UPDATE: People have been asking how to watch the keynote—click here to take a look. Allison and I break down each of these trends with much more context; please watch it! (You can also see the rap and this weird hat I wore.)

We're two weeks past the biggest Customer Success event in the history of humanity. (Unless there's an ancient civilization with a heretofore unknown focus on customer outcomes—here's a hot take: did Atlantis churn?)

Seriously though, Pulse 2018 was our largest, most successful event ever. More than 5,000 people showed up, and in an even bigger accomplishment, the Wi-Fi actually worked!

I remember in the morning before the opening keynote looking out at a sea of 5,000 chairs wondering how in the world we were ever going to fill them—then imagining what it would be like if we actually did and almost having an Eminem "8 Mile" moment.

Don't worry, none of "mom's spaghetti" came up. But I did perform our rap song during the keynote—I joked that I probably had a bigger audience for my hip-hop debut than Eminem did for his!

But the sad truth is that nobody really came to see me do my best Vanilla Ice impression. People come to Pulse for a lot of reasons: to network and learn from the Customer Success community at large, to see the big initiatives Gainsight has been working on—this year we unveiled new, cutting-edge AI and machine learning tech, and an exciting, multi-threaded partner ecosystem; more on that later—but most of all, they come to get great content that prepares them for the future of the profession and the marketplace. That's why every year, we lay out the biggest trends we see happening in the CS movement.

Allison Pickens, our CCO, and I picked out the five main trends we see in Customer Success. You can watch the whole thing here, but I wanted to quickly outline them here because I'd love to hear your feedback! (I'm kind of obsessed with feedback, but that's a different story.)

1. Crossing the Chasm

One of our headlining speakers at Pulse was Geoffrey Moore. His "Chasm" framework for business is well-known, but he had some incredible insight on how CS is crossing its own chasm. We've seen there's a huge gap between reactive CSM and the kind of transformative, company wide mission we advocate for. But the companies that can cross this chasm are seeing huge benefits.

2. CS > CSM

This is a trend that we've championed for a long time, and it's great to see it taking hold in innovative companies. Customer Success is much more than the Customer Success Management team - it’s a company-wide effort. I will admit, it's an imperative that's easy to lose sight of when there isn't buy-in at every level. That's why we advocate flipping org structures 90-degrees, with the customer journey through each department as the focal point.

3. Outside-in

Speaking of the customer journey, raise your hand if your customer journey aligns to metrics like adoption, retention, expansion, etc. The problem is that your customer doesn't think about their own journey in these terms; they don't care about your churn rate. We're noticing more CS teams building out success plans that map to the outcomes the customer DOES care about—outside-in not inside-out. (You can put your hand down now!)

4. Career Success

Did you see LinkedIn's data analysis of the most promising jobs of 2018? Spoiler alert: CSM is #3! It's one of the fastest-growing jobs in the U.S. and it's not slowing down. I've been saying that the new pathway to CEO is through Customer Success—no one has a stronger cross-functional view—but I also recognize that the onus is on leading companies to recognize this. Also the best companies are investing in career paths and training for their CS teams.

5. Prescriptive

This is the trend I'm most excited about, and it's one we've really dived into headfirst. Many companies approach Customer Success in a service-oriented way—“What can we do for you? How can we help?” The most innovative companies realize they are the experts and that they need to “be brave” (as Allison says) and lead their clients prescriptively.

We’ve internalized this at Gainsight. Because CS is relatively new (compared to well-established motions like sales and marketing), there's a tendency to view every company as a unique "snowflake." But the reality is that we have enough data and experience to develop standardized processes already. That's the mentality behind Elements, our (somewhat nerdy) periodic table of 16 best-practice solutions. There's too much to explain here, but if you click out on only one link from this article, please let it be this one!

What do you think? What are the other trends we left off our list? Or do you agree with the inclusion of any of these five?