--- layout: handbook-page-toc title: "Customer Success" --- # Welcome to the Customer Success Handbook {:.no_toc} The Customer Success department is part of the [GitLab Sales](/handbook/sales) function who partners with our large and strategic customers to deliver value throughout their journey with GitLab. The team can be reached in [Slack channel](https://gitlab.slack.com/archives/customer-success) (internal only). ## On this page {:.no_toc .hidden-md .hidden-lg} - TOC {:toc .hidden-md .hidden-lg} ## Mission Statement To deliver value to all customers by engaging in a consistent, repeatable, scalable way across defined segments so that customers see the value in their investment with GitLab, and we retain and drive growth within our enterprise customers. * The mission of the Customer Success Department is to provide these customers with experience in order to: * Accelerate initial customer value * Maximize long-term, sustainable customer value * Improve overall customer satisfaction & referenceability * Maximize the total value of the customer to GitLab ## Vision Page The ["Customer Success Vision Page"](/handbook/customer-success/vision) provides the long-term view of company wide success to which the customer success will be building in partnership with the value centers of the GitLab organization (i.e., Marketing, Sales, Product/Engineering, Support, Finance and IT). ## Department Initiatives Our large and strategic customers are in need of an ongoing partnership that combines expert guidance with flexibility and adaptability to support their adoption and continuous improvement initiatives. These customers expect that partner to provide a streamlined, consistent and fully coordinated experience that encompasses the full span of their needs as well as the fully lifecycle of the relationship. Need to focus on 4 main areas in order to grow in our existing accounts as well as land large and strategic: 1. Awareness 2. Adoption 3. Usage 4. Performance ### Initiative: Awareness Opportunity to improve the overall awareness of GitLab in order to promote and evangelize our brand and solution in a meaningful way to provide big business impact to our customers so that they believe in our vision and strategy. ### Initiative: Adoption Ensuring paying customers are successful in their onboarding in order to gain adoption and get the most out of our platform and remain happy, paying GitLab team-members and brand advocates. ### Initiative: Usage Collecting and making use of customer data and insights is key to customer success. It’s important to do more with data and when necessary share back with customers, which in turn helps and encourages our customers to improve and drive adoption. ### Initiative: Performance Utilizing built-in monitoring instrumentation and [a scalable HA architecture](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/administration/high_availability/README.html#reference-architecture), The Customer Success team helps ensure implementations of GitLab are operating at peak performance as organization scale and adopt more features. ## Customer Success Groups ### Solutions Architects * [Solutions Architects handbook](/handbook/customer-success/solutions-architects/) ### Professional Services * [Professional Services handbook](/handbook/customer-success/professional-services-engineering/) ### Technical Account Managers * [Technical Account Manager handbook](/handbook/customer-success/tam/) ## Commercial Sales - Customer Success * [Commercial Sales - Customer Success handbook](/handbook/customer-success/comm-sales/) ## Transition and Handoff Workflow In an effort to capture the wider scope of customer interactions with GitLab, the flow outlined below will soon addresses the business processes involved through the entire service lifecycle and customer journey. There is an active initiative to unify stages, phases, titles, names, etc led by Marketing and Sales. ## Responsibility Matrix and Transitions The table below depicts the relationships between activities, responsible roles, relationship and opportunity stages in the customer lifecycle. A more detailed in the [responsibility assignment matrix (RACI)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_assignment_matrix) format will be an critical tool for every GitLab customer. | **Sequence** | Activity | Who's Responsible | Business Relationship Stage | Opportunity Stage | Output | | ------: | :------ | :------ | :------ | :------ | :------ | | **1** | Create relationship lifecycle meta-record (e.g., SFDC) | Account Executive | Lead or Contact | Discovery | A data record containing information related to the prospect and having data fields attributes that will support the long term ability to "current state" of a customer at any given point in the lifecycle. This cell links to an example customer "meta-record" | | **2** | Qualify the lead in terms of GitLab value to their organization | Account Executive | Lead or Contact | Discovery | | | **3** | Engage solution architects | Account Executive | Lead or Contact | Discovery | | | **4** | Intro and engage solution architect in technical conversations | Account Executive | Lead or Contact | Discovery | | | **5** | Update relevant SFDC fields with new information | Account Executive | Opportunity | Scoping | | | **6** | Demo GitLab tech and articulate the value proposition | Solutions Architect | Opportunity | Scoping | | | **7** | High-level technical discovery and fit assessment | Solutions Architect | Opportunity | Technical Evaluation | Updates to the customer technical profile that demonstrate the architectural fit is feasible and provides sufficient information for generating a SOW and solution design blueprint. | | **8** | Capture environment and technical specifics for each prospect | GitLab Group | Opportunity | Technical Evaluation | Enriched customer meta-record | | **9** | Create a solution design blueprint from requirements gathering, tech discovery and customer meta-record | Solution Architect | Opportunity | Technical Evaluation | Blueprint solution design diagram | | **10** | Handoff solution design blueprint to Professional Services Engineer and TAM | Solutions Architect | Opportunity | Technical Evaluation | PSE and TAM full review | | **11** | Validate the solution design as generated by Solutions Architect | PSE and TAM | Opportunity | Proposal | Approval / signoff by PSE and TAM | | **12** | Create and submit professional services implementation SOW to stakeholders | Professional Services Engineer | Opportunity | Proposal | Statement of Work (inclusive of blueprint solution design) | | **13** | Create and submit Proof of Value (PoV/PoC) plan to stakeholders | Solution Architect | Opportunity | Technical Evaluation | PoV plan (inclusive of blueprint solution design) | | **14** | Agreed upon success criteria | GitLab Group | Opportunity | Negotiating | A document that clearly articulates what done looks like and when done is successful. The success criteria are required for proof of value or a professional services implementation. The document should be signed by an accountable individual from both parties and verbally discussed. | | **15** | Create and complete [Customer Success Plan](/handbook/customer-success/tam/#managing-the-customer-engagement) | Solutions Architect | Opportunity | Negotiating | | **16** | Close with a technical win, negotiated terms and signed contract | GitLab Group | Opportunity | Closed Won | Contract, MSA, SLA, OLA, et al the other legal bits | | **17** | [PoV project kick-off](/handbook/sales/POV/) | Solutions Architect | Opportunity | Negotiating | Kick-off and proof of value execution plan catered to the customer | | **18** | Official introduction and account management transition to TAM to customer stakeholders via [Welcome Call](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/account-management/customer-collaboration-project-template/issues/24) | Account Executive | Opportunity | Technical Evaluation | | | **19** | Professional Services Implementation kick-off | Technical Account Manager | Customer | Closed Won | Kick-off and implementation plan catered to the customer | | **20** | Transition customer meta-record and technical profile to PSE or TAM | Solutions Architect | Customer | Closed Won | | | **21** | Transition customer meta-record and business profile to TAM | Account Executive | Customer | Closed Won | | | **22** | Full use-case, stakeholder, technology stack, and opportunity discovery | Technical Account Manager | Customer | Closed Won | Update fields in Salesforce, and Customer Success Plan | | **23** | Manage the ongoing customer meta-record rigorously | Technical Account Manager | Customer | Closed Won | | ## Customer Success Data Management Customer names, customer information security and NDA compliance are critical concerns for Customer Success, since we communicate with customers every day. All issues managing work as it relates to prospects and customers must be private and confidential. Work should be managed only in approved GitLab projects and never within private repositories. GitLab employee-only accessible projects for work management include: * [us-public-sector](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/us-public-sector) parent project for all public sector work * [account-management](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/account-management/) parent project for account-specific work and collaboration with the rest of sales * [customer-success](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/customer-success) parent project for Customer Success employee, shared or triage work ## Other Resources ### Using Salesforce within Customer Success Visit [this page](/handbook/customer-success/using-salesforce-within-customer-success/) for more info on using Salesforce within Customer Success ### Customer Success Metrics We currently have a [Customer Success Metrics](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/customer-success/cs-metrics) Project within GitLab. This project is used to requesting new reports, dashboards and suggesting new metrics that we may need for the department. This will sometimes be cross-referenced with a data & analytics project. ### Optimized Account Growth Program In order to evangelize and grow the use of GitLab in existing accounts, the [Optimized Account Growth Program](/handbook/customer-success/optimized-account-growth-program) has been developed to facilitate collaborative sessions and workshops within customer environments. The program is intended to improve the partnership between GitLab and the customer, solving complex business problems while reducing cycle times and improving workflow, ultimately resulting in the growth in adoption and usage of GitLab in customer environments. ### Dogfooding Outside of Engineering the Customer Success team has the largest concentration of tooling development capability. The team has unique needs that can't always be solved by GitLab's single DevOps platform. However, it is important to [dogfood](/handbook/values/#dogfooding) and avoid [dogfooding anti-patterns](/handbook/engineering/#dogfooding-antipatterns). As a result the [Product organization heavily weights internal customers](/handbook/values/#dogfooding) when considering prioritization. If you are considering building tooling in support of Customer Success priorities outside of GitLab, please follow the [dogfooding process](/handbook/values/#dogfooding). ### Customer Success AWS Test Account In an effort to keep AWS spend down initiatives are being taken automatically clean up our AWS account. This account is primarily used as a proof of concept for IaC and creating demo's for GitLab customers. An automated cleanup script is currently being test that will tag, shutdown and delete old resources as they are no longer needed. The automation will... * Turn off and Tag Un-named resources. When resources are created a "Name" tag should be created with a value that's meaningful and indicates who deployed the resource. Example: {initials}-GitLabRunner * New Resources will be automatically tagged with a Discovered and Expiration tag. * The Expiration tag is 14 days after the discovery. The script will only a tag an instance once. If you need additional time, please change the date to a reasonable date for cleanup (Add a month or two for prospective customers). * If a resource needs to be permanent please set termination protection on the instance. This should also include tagging the instance with an explanation on why it's permanent and what its for. * On expiration the resource will be shut off and left for 7 days. * In 7 days if the instance is still off a snapshot will be taken and it will be terminated. * If the instance is still on but the expiration has not been changed it will be terminated. ### Frequently Asked Questions Customer Success team members maintain a [FAQ](/handbook/customer-success/faq) to keep questions customers ask documented in a place where everyone can view and contribute to. ### Customer Success resource links outside handbook * [Solutions Architects Onboarding Bootcamp](/handbook/customer-success/solutions-architects-onboarding-bootcamp/) * [HealthCheck](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aHA3W2FsHUApnz2XVtJoyhpcGYy6bgOHoRi4ArXnF0o/edit) (Internal Only) * [Customer Reference Sheet](https://docs.google.com/a/gitlab.com/spreadsheets/d/1Off9pVkc2krT90TyOEevmr4ZtTEmutMj8dLgCnIbhRs/edit?usp=sharing) * [Sales Collateral](https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-ytP5bMib9TaUZQeDRzcE9idVk) * [GitLab University](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/university/) * [Our Support Handbook](/handbook/support/) * [GitLab Hosted](/gitlab-hosted/) * [Customer Collaboration Project template](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/account-management/customer-collaboration-project-template) * [Workflow SA Demo Scenarios](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kSVUNM4u6KI8M9FxoyiUbHEHAHIi34iiY25NhMxLucc/edit) (Internal Only) ### Other Sales Topics * [Sales Handbook](/handbook/sales/) * [Sales Operations](/handbook/business-ops/) * [Sales Skills Best Practices](/handbook/sales-training/) * [Sales Discovery Questions](/handbook/sales-qualification-questions/) * [EE Product Qualification Questions](/handbook/sales-qualification-questions/) * [GitLab Positioning](/handbook/positioning-faq/) * [FAQ from prospects](/handbook/sales-faq-from-prospects/) * [Client Use Cases](/handbook/use-cases/) * [Proof of Value Guidelines](/handbook/sales/POV/) * [Account Planning Template for Large/Strategic Accounts](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1yQ6W7I30I4gW5Vi-TURIz8ZxnmL88uksCl0u9oyRrew/edit?ts=58b89146#slide=id.g1c9fcf1d5b_0_24)) * [Sales Demo](/handbook/marketing/product-marketing/demo/) * [Sales Development Group Handbook](/handbook/marketing/marketing-sales-development/sdr/) * [With Whom to Talk to Ask Questions or Give Feedback on a GitLab feature](/handbook/product/categories/#devops-stages) * [CEO Preferences when speaking with prospects and customers](/handbook/people-group/ceo-preferences/#sales-meetings) ### Customer Success & Market Segmentation For definitions of the account size, refer to [market segmentation](/handbook/business-ops/resources/#segmentation). - Large: Strategic Account Leader closes deal and stays on account for growth and renewal. Solutions Architect is assigned pre-sales and transitions the account to a Technical Account Manager after the sale to guide customer adoption and growth. - Mid-Market: Account Executive closes deal with Solutions Architect pre-sales assistance. Customer then transfers to Technical Account Manager to guide customer adoption and growth. - SMB: Web Portal with Sales Admin and SMB Technical Account Manager oversight. ### Customer Success Meetings Customer Success has a few standing meetings: - All CS Team Call - every other Thursday at 7am PST - VP of Customer Success Office Hours - every other Thursday at 7am PST - CS Skills Exchange - every Wednesday, alternating between 7:30am PST and 11am PST The different groups within CS also have standing meetings, including meetings for the SAs, PS, and TAMs groups, regional groups, and social calls. On the All CS Team Call, once a month, we have a few volunteers to discuss and/or demo new features from the most recent release: | GitLab Release | Feature | Presenter | Role | Region | Recording | |----------------|---------|-----------|------|--------|-----------| | 12.9 | [Dismissing Multiple Vulnerabilities](https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2020/03/22/gitlab-12-9-released/#select-and-dismiss-multiple-vulnerabilities) | Sameer Kamani | Solutions Architect | Public Sector | [Video](https://youtu.be/bmiJ9LkoniA)| | 12.9 | [Group Export and Import via API](https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2020/03/22/gitlab-12-9-released/#group-export-and-import-is-available-using-the-api) | Sameer Kamani | Solutions Architect | Public Sector | [Video](https://youtu.be/pJiTSzUi1l4)| | 12.9 | [High Availability with Gitaly (alpha)](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/administration/gitaly/praefect.html) | Sophie Pouliquen | Technical Account Manager | Enterprise East | [Video](https://youtu.be/LfsF8ysExpY)| | 12.10 | TBD | Chloe Whitestone | Technical Account Manager | Mid-Market East | | 12.10 | | | |