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

May 24, 2024

[**Gainsight**](https://www.gainsight.com/), 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.

Interview with Tim Van Lew - Director of Strategy at Gainsight from Laudable on Vimeo

### 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 will 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.”

## Generate tons of customer proof, using what customers _already_ said.

Unlock the gold mine of customer proof hiding in your sales and customer success call recordings.