Welcome to the Customer Success Handbook

The Customer Success department is part of the GitLab 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 (internal only).

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 in our 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” 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, 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

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 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/PoC project kick-off 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 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 parent project for all public sector work
  • account-management parent project for account-specific work and collaboration with the rest of sales

  • customer-success parent project for Customer Success employee, shared or triage work

    Other Resources

    Using Salesforce within Customer Success

    Visit this page for more info on using Salesforce within Customer Success

    Customer Success Metrics

    We currently have a Customer Success 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 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 dogfoodand avoid dogfooding anti-patterns. As a result the Product organization heavily weights internal customers when considering prioritization. If you are considering building tooling in support of Customer Success priorities outside of GitLab, please follow the dogfooding process.

    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.

    Customer Success resource links outside handbook

  • Solutions Architects Onboarding Bootcamp

  • HealthCheck (Internal Only)
  • Customer Reference Sheet
  • Sales Collateral
  • GitLab University
  • Our Support Handbook
  • GitLab Hosted
  • Customer Collaboration Project template

  • Workflow SA Demo Scenarios (Internal Only)

    Other Sales Topics

  • Sales Handbook

  • Sales Operations
  • Sales Skills Best Practices
  • Sales Discovery Questions
  • EE Product Qualification Questions
  • GitLab Positioning
  • FAQ from prospects
  • Client Use Cases
  • Proof of Concept Guidelines
  • Account Planning Template for Large/Strategic Accounts)
  • Sales Demo
  • Sales Development Group Handbook
  • With Whom to Talk to Ask Questions or Give Feedback on a GitLab feature

  • CEO Preferences when speaking with prospects and customers

    Customer Success & Market Segmentation

    For definitions of the account size, refer to market 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.