Gainsight Delivers Record-Breaking Year, Surpassing $100 Million ARR as Momentum for Customer Success Movement Accelerates Worldwide

Gainsight, the c Company, today announced highlights from a record-breaking fiscal year. The company’s momentum comes on the heels of a majority investment from Vista Equity Partners, a leading global investment firm for enterprise software, data and technology-enabled businesses.

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“The transformative power of Customer Success vastly accelerated in what was a challenging year for many businesses”

2020 marked a year of significant growth for Gainsight as it surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). The company achieved record-breaking bookings from around the globe as enterprises in SaaS, technology, manufacturing, healthcare, finance, and security, amongst others, expanded their focus on end-to-end customer-centricity and net dollar retention (NDR) as the core driver for business growth.

“The transformative power of Customer Success vastly accelerated in what was a challenging year for many businesses,” said Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta. “In a digital-led world, where software sits at the core of what nearly every business already is, or is striving to become, growth, and in some cases survival, rests on their ability to deliver across the entire customer journey—from ensuring a great in-product experience to driving the business outcomes that their customers expect. In this day and age, retention and expansion, not sales and marketing, are the defining factors for growth and enterprise valuation.”

As Gainsight prepares for its next phase of growth, the company plans to accelerate hiring around the globe, including positions in product and engineering, sales and marketing, finance, Customer Success, and teammates success.

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Momentum Highlights:

Revenue Growth: Gainsight’s revenue growth exceeded expectations as both born-in-the-cloud SaaS businesses and others going through large digital transformations accelerated their adoption of Customer Success and Product Experience technologies. Key new customer wins included:

• Software and SaaS: Quest Software, Avalara, Zendesk, Totaljobs Group, Omnitracs, Logicalis, Automattic, Showpad, Zuora, ZoomInfo
• Telecommunications: Lumen Technologies, Puzzel
• Security: Dataminr, Malwarebytes, Hackerone
• EdTech: Degreed, SMART Technologies, Newsela
• Healthcare IT: Medidata Solutions, Within3, CentralReach, Innovaccer
• FinTech: Avalara, IRIS Group, Zuora, Receipt Bank Limited, Mambu

Simplicity and Innovation: Gainsight introduced a number of product innovations over the past year, while also helping new customers reduce time-to-value by up to 66 percent—launching Gainsight’s Customer Success platform in less than 10 weeks on average and increasing new customers’ Net Promoter Score to 85. Other key product highlights from 2020 include:

• Horizon Experience: A simple, intuitive, and beautiful design system that provides an efficiency boost and faster time-to-value. The innovative design system is built on the Gainsight NXT platform, allowing customers to integrate with the CRM of their choice for faster value, a stunning UI, and maximum flexibility.
• Sightline: The industry’s first Customer Success ecosystem, comprising Sightline Vault, a one-stop-shop featuring more than 100 pre-configured Gainsight best practices, templates, playbooks, and more, is fueled by contributions from Gainsight’s customer community. Sightline Integrations, a robust and growing collection of high-impact integrations and technology configurations, was created in collaboration with more than 50 partners.
• Experience Center: Provides a centralized location for customer experience data to help businesses solve gaps and assess the impact of their actions on customer retention and revenue growth through robust reporting, revenue matrices, and advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP).
• Renewal Center: Enables teams to maximize retention and scale renewals management by leveraging data science to predict which upcoming renewal opportunities are most likely to close and surfacing those that need attention.
• Company Intelligence: Allows users to stay up-to-date on their key customers, prospects, and competitors by searching the web for publicly available information and delivering seamless notifications via Slack, Email, or the Gainsight Customer 360 dashboard.
• People Maps: Provides a graphical view of the reporting hierarchy in an organization, layering in relevant customer insights such as contact sentiment, engagement, and influence, giving users the ability to identify and connect with key stakeholders for renewals and expansions.
• CS+PX Integration: Further enhancements were made for the Gainsight CS and Gainsight PX integration, making it bi-directional and real-time to help orchestrate world-class user experiences from onboarding to full product adoption.
• Gainsight PX Governance: A set of powerful and configurable settings such as engagement multi-level prioritization, throttling with weekly capping, and admin-console to quickly detect any engagement or integration issues at scale.
• Gainsight PX Mobile and Desktop SDKs: In addition to web and email channels, users can now gain visibility to product usage and deliver personalized user experience in Mobile and Desktop applications.

Community and Events: As the creator of the Customer Success category, Gainsight continued its mission to support the industry and broader community through its events and thought leadership, including:

• Pulse Everywhere: More than 23,000 people registered for Pulse Everywhere last May, the company’s first virtual Pulse conference—representing 4x growth over the previous year’s in-person attendance at the Moscone Center.
• Pulse for Product: Gainsight’s first ever Pulse for Product virtual event brought together more than 5,000 product management professionals for three days of online education and networking, making it the largest gathering of product professionals in the world.
• Gainsight GameChanger Community: Gainsight launched its new GameChanger Online Community as a place for Gainsight admins and Customer Success operations professionals to share knowledge, discuss ideas and network. Today, the growing community has more than 5,000 members.
• Human-First CEO Series: Gainsight’s LinkedIn Live video series, hosted by Nick Mehta, features interviews with top tech CEOs from companies like Box, Zuora, Okta, Splunk, PagerDuty, WP Engine, Twilio, and more. The series attracts nearly 2,500 viewers per episode.
• The Customer Success Economy: Written by CEO Nick Mehta and former COO Allison Pickens, the latest book from Gainsight is for leaders who want to gain a competitive advantage in the most relevant and important arena today—customer retention. It offers examples and practical advice on how companies can transform functions, leadership roles, responsibilities, and strategies so that the whole company can work together in total service to the customer.
• The Customer Success Professionals Handbook: Written by Gainsight CCO, Ashvin Vaidyanathan and former Chief Strategist, Ruben Rabago, the book is a practical guide that fills a significant gap in professional Customer Success literature, providing the knowledge every CSM needs to succeed―from the practitioner level all the way to senior leadership. It includes real-world guidance and practical advice for aspiring and experienced CSMs alike.

Philanthropy: Gainsight raised more than $1.1 million in partnership with SV Academy to launch the CS You initiative, a training and apprenticeship program designed to help level the playing field for underrepresented communities and create more opportunities for careers in Customer Success. To date, CS You has trained 30 individuals, placing 25 in Customer Success Associate roles, with an additional 30 starting training in March 2021.

Majority Investment by Vista Equity Partners: In November 2020, Gainsight announced it had signed an agreement to receive a majority investment from Vista Equity Partners, a transaction which has now closed. Together, Gainsight and Vista will continue to provide its customers with best-in-class software solutions, customer service and Customer Success thought leadership, while expanding its product portfolio, customer base, and geographic footprint.

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