A few months ago, leading customer success platform Gainsight partnered with multinational software company SAP to deliver a powerful integration between Gainsight CS and SAP Sales Cloud. This integration helps businesses transform how they deliver value-driven customer experiences at scale to maximize customer retention and revenue growth. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Gainsight President and COO Chuck Ganapathi and SAP’s Senior Vice President of CX Solution Management Nitin Badjatia to learn more about their partnership.
(Left: SAP’s Senior Vice President of CX Solution Management Nitin Badjatia, Right: Gainsight President and COO Chuck Ganapathi)
Pulse 2.0 (Amit): What was the primary motivation behind the strategic partnership between Gainsight and SAP, and how do you envision it transforming customer success for SAP customers?
SAP (Nitin): The sales journey is continuous, and organizations committed to customer success recognize the importance of consistently meeting customer expectations while uncovering new, innovative growth opportunities. This is central to our strategy for SAP Sales Cloud, which is why SAP is excited to partner with Gainsight.
By integrating Gainsight’s AI-powered customer success platform directly into SAP Sales Cloud, we’re helping businesses stay closely attuned to customer needs and deliver relevant value at every touchpoint. Our partnership bridges the pre-and post-sales journey, bringing in the data intelligence needed to streamline workflows. This is going to drive significant automation and foster collaboration between teams that are often siloed. Ultimately, it will help us close deals faster, retain more clients, and expand business more effectively.
Pulse 2.0 (Amit): Can you elaborate on how the integration of Gainsight CS with SAP Sales Cloud will enhance the customer experience and drive retention for businesses?
Gainsight (Chuck): Gainsight joined forces with SAP to empower businesses to act with greater precision, nurturing customer loyalty and driving retention in a way that’s never been possible before. By integrating the CS experience into SAP Sales Cloud, we are creating seamless workflows that streamline processes and enhance relationships at scale. As for customers, this will feel like a unified experience with less friction by delivering a holistic view of the customer journey on a single platform that supports both sales and customer success teams. For example, imagine a healthcare technology company aiming to boost customer retention and maximize growth opportunities. With this integration, this company’s customer success teams can build personalized success plans and targeted support strategies aligned with each of their customer’s specific goals, enhancing upsell and cross-sell potential. Meanwhile, sales teams gain valuable insights into metrics like customer satisfaction and system usage patterns, enabling them to refine their approach and better tailor future sales cycles. This unified strategy will allow both teams to deliver a more seamless, client-centered experience, fostering stronger relationships and supporting sustainable growth.
For customers looking for even deeper, real-time insights, they can use AI tools to better understand the strength of each customer relationship. Powerful solutions such as Staircase AI provide analysis of every customer interaction, across every channel, in real-time. Today, companies determine customer health through human judgment and explicit signals like NPS and product usage, but these indicators can be unreliable. With Staircase AI, businesses can tap directly into the implicit signals hidden within human interactions.
Pulse 2.0 (Amit): What specific strategies will the partnership employ to address the challenges of bridging the handoff between pre- and post-sales?
SAP (Nitin): First impressions are everything, and that handoff can make or break the customer experience. To effectively address the challenges of bridging the handoff between pre- and post-sales, organizations should focus on strategies that enable seamless data flow and collaboration between teams. By using a flexible, plug-and-play framework in SAP Sales Cloud, businesses can effortlessly incorporate Gainsight data into their SAP Sales Cloud environment, ensuring it aligns seamlessly with existing data and while reinforcing SAP’s commitment to intelligent CX. Automated workflows and shared customer insights create continuity for each customer’s journey, so no matter where they are—before, during, or after the sale—their experience is cohesive and responsive. This continuity allows teams to work together seamlessly, minimizing friction for the customer.
Pulse 2.0 (Amit): What unique advantages do Gainsight’s AI-powered solutions offer to businesses?
Gainsight (Chuck): Gainsight’s AI capabilities give businesses an edge by helping them understand not just what’s happening with a customer but why. Gainsight AI is specifically designed and trained to understand the unique post-sales needs of businesses and tailor its insights to each individual company’s specific requirements. Customers can then leverage this intelligence at various stages of the customer journey, including meeting preparation, email drafting, risk identification, and identifying expansion opportunities.
Staircase AI by Gainsight is unique in that it pulls data from every conversational point of the customer journey, including email, meetings, chat, Slack, and ticketing systems. It then continuously scans millions of interactions between teams and customers, helping to identify patterns that signal growth opportunities or churn risks as well as sentiment and relationship strength to inform decisions that improve customer experience and drive growth.
Pulse 2.0 (Amit): How will this partnership promote collaboration across different teams—sales, customer success, and support—within organizations?
Gainsight (Chuck): These departments are often viewed as siloed functions, yet they all interact directly with customers. How they collaborate behind the scenes is crucial. It begins with a cultural shift that prioritizes customer success as a core part of the organization’s mindset. The integration between Gainsight and SAP makes this vision a reality by fostering collaboration and aligning all customer-facing teams around a shared set of data and insights. Sales, customer success, and support teams each bring unique strengths to the customer relationship, and with a unified understanding of the customer’s journey, they can work more effectively together. Gainsight’s platform enables cross-functional playbooks, allowing every team to contribute to customer success and drive retention and growth.
Pulse 2.0 (Amit): What metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) do you believe will best reflect the success of this partnership for SAP customers?
SAP (Nitin): We focus on metrics like customer retention rates, Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and revenue growth attributable to customer success activities. Additionally, seeing an increase in cross-functional collaboration—reflected in reduced time to value and higher upsell success—will also be indicators that our customers are reaping the benefits of this partnership.
Pulse 2.0 (Amit): How do you see the Gainsight partnership unlocking new possibilities for industries that have traditionally been less focused on customer success?
SAP (Nitin): Industries like retail, manufacturing, and utilities have historically been product-centric but are increasingly recognizing the importance of customer success. In the past, customer success teams were mainly seen as essential for SaaS companies focused on retention. However, now businesses across many sectors understand the importance of repeat customers. These companies view accounts not just as transactions but as sources of recurring revenue—customers who could eventually leave if not properly managed.
Through our integration with Gainsight, these industries now have the tools to proactively manage customer relationships, spot upsell opportunities, and ensure customers are realizing value from their products. This partnership brings the concept of customer success to new sectors, empowering them to innovate their engagement strategies and build stronger customer loyalty.
Pulse 2.0 (Amit): How do you believe this partnership positions Gainsight and SAP in the competitive landscape of customer success solutions?
Gainsight (Chuck): By combining Gainsight’s industry-leading customer success technology with SAP’s deep enterprise reach, we’re positioning ourselves to lead the customer success market. Our joint approach aligns pre- and post-sales efforts in a way that hasn’t been done at this scale before. We’re not just meeting the current needs of existing customers—we’re always looking for ways to bring our technology into the hands of new businesses that can benefit from it. We’ve done this with the acquisition of Staircase AI, enabling teams to uncover the hidden signals and patterns they might miss. And make sharper, data-driven decisions for better outcomes. This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how AI can improve the continuous sales and post-sales journey.
As the leader in this space, it’s on us to continue pushing beyond the current reach of customer success and solve similar challenges for new industries. This is how we lead—by setting a new standard for integrated, data-driven, and AI-powered customer success that gives our customers a distinct competitive advantage.
Pulse 2.0 (Amit): What role do you see innovation playing in customer success moving forward, particularly in the context of this partnership?
Gainsight (Chuck): Innovation, particularly with AI, is critical to evolving customer success, especially as the technology continues to transform how we understand and engage with customers. With SAP, we’re not only driving new technological capabilities but also setting new benchmarks for how AI can predict needs, improve retention, and create stronger customer outcomes. This partnership is our commitment to helping customers grow through innovation.
Pulse 2.0 (Amit): What message would you like to convey to current and prospective SAP customers regarding the benefits they can expect from this new partnership?
SAP (Nitin): To our customers, I’d say: This partnership is about empowering you to get closer to your customers than ever before. With Gainsight CS integrated into SAP Sales Cloud, you’ll have the tools to engage, retain, and grow your customers in a proactive, data-driven way. We’re here to help you not just meet but exceed customer expectations in a competitive market.
