Gild is helping companies better recruit engineers, by using data available on the web (including developers' actual code) to help measure their abilities.

Brad Warga's the SVP Customer Success there. He joined when there were just 5 people: CEO, CTO, CSO, head of sales & head of marketing (now there's 50+).

Brad had been in HR/recruiting for 20 years, including recently being the VP of Corporate Recruiting at Salesforce, helping organize & execute thousands of hires.

The team wasn't exactly sure what Brad would do at first, but they felt he could bring a lot of credibility, and he did. First, he helped bring in new customers.

After The First Year Of Selling

During most of the first year of selling, Brad helped bring in new customers, until there were about 50. Churn was artificially low -as everyone was on annual contracts!

When the contracts began coming up for renewal, churn jumped to 3-4% a month, or 30%+ per year; 2-3x their target.

Churn Goals: "15% & 0%"

Saas companies want:

1) 15% or less churn per year on their total number of customers, &

2) 0% or negative revenue churn (upsell revenue from ongoing customers should exceed revenue lost from leaving customers).

Gild starting measuring and analyzing churn, and realized many of their assumptions were wrong.

For example, it turned out that how often people logged in wasn't a great way to tell who would stay or go. Gild actually needed to look at which parts of the product were being used, and how. How savvy were the users? What were their recruiting needs and methods?By digging into these root causes of churn, Brad & Gild were able to systematize customer success and drop churn to <1% per month.

(And - it made Gild much smarter about targeting the right kinds of customers from the very beginning with lead generation.)

The Three Methods That Dropped Churn:

1. "90 Day Adoption"

The Customer Success team's relationship with a customer starts when the customer purchases the product and it's turned on.

The team trains the new users how to use the product, what the best recruiting practices are, and re-sells / re-evangelizes Gild to the users to get them excited.

Gild found out that if there's successful usage of the product in the first 90 days, then usage will be 3x higher for the rest of the year compared to a customer who didn't adopt fast.

2. Quarterly Business Reviews

These "reviews" are formal and help hold the customer accountable to what they signed up for. Ideally, they're onsite with the right customers.

3. Using Predictive Tools

Gild's main Customer Success application is Gainsight, along with Zendesk (captures trouble tickets and feature requests), Salesforce.com, and Olark (chat).

Team Composition

The Gild Customer Success ("CS") team has about 10 people across three roles (out of 50 employees!):

1) "Inside CS reps" who train, monitor usage & run analytics. There's one rep per 70 users.

2) "Outside CS reps" who handle & are measured on renewals. There is one rep per 30 users in their relevant customer segment.

3) "Executive CS reps" who are responsible for upselling, and who work mostly with the larger or fast-growing customer segment.

These teams' main app is Gainsight, which also displays Salesforce.com & Zendesk data, so everything's in one interface.

The Gainsight reports & dashboards make it easy to spot at-risk customers or customers who need more product, and gives reps a reason to call a customer to talk.

C-Level Customer Success

A lot of companies treat customer success as an afterthought, or glorified customer support. Companies need to treat it (at least) as important as sales or marketing.

At Gild, Customer Success owns:

1. 90 Day Adoption
2. Feeding usage data & customer feedback into the product roadmap
3. Renewals
4. Upsells

By owning these and being able to clearly articulate them, it's easy for the board to recognize the value of Customer Success there.