Gainsight vs Salesforce: What are the differences?

Introduction

Gainsight and Salesforce are both widely used CRM platforms, but they have some key differences in their functionalities and features. Here are six specific differences between Gainsight and Salesforce.

1. Data management capabilities: Gainsight focuses more on customer success management by providing robust data management capabilities specifically designed to help businesses enhance customer relationships and drive customer success. Salesforce, on the other hand, is a comprehensive CRM platform that offers a wide range of features including data management, sales, marketing, and customer service.

2. Customer journey tracking: Gainsight offers advanced customer journey tracking functionalities, allowing businesses to track and analyze the entire customer lifecycle. This feature helps businesses identify potential issues and opportunities to proactively engage customers and drive customer success. Salesforce, although it provides some level of customer journey tracking, focuses more on traditional sales and marketing functionalities.

3. Customer health scoring: Gainsight provides a unique feature called customer health scoring, which assesses the health of each customer based on different metrics such as product usage, support tickets, and more. This scoring system enables businesses to prioritize their efforts and resources to effectively manage and retain high-value customers. Salesforce does not include a built-in customer health scoring feature.

4. NPS (Net Promoter Score) tracking: Gainsight offers built-in NPS tracking capabilities, allowing businesses to measure and analyze customer satisfaction and loyalty. This feature helps businesses identify promoters, passives, and detractors among their customer base, enabling them to take appropriate actions to improve customer relationships. Salesforce does not have a dedicated NPS tracking feature.

5. Renewal and expansion management: Gainsight provides comprehensive renewal and expansion management functionalities, which automate and streamline the entire renewal and upselling processes. This feature helps businesses maximize customer lifetime value and revenue growth. Salesforce, while it does offer some basic renewal and upselling features, does not provide as extensive capabilities as Gainsight.

6. Customer communication and engagement: Gainsight offers advanced customer communication and engagement capabilities, including personalized emails, in-app messaging, surveys, and more. These features enable businesses to proactively interact with customers, gather feedback, and drive customer success. While Salesforce also includes some communication and engagement tools, they are not as extensive as Gainsight's offerings.

In summary, Gainsight focuses on customer success management and offers powerful features like advanced data management, customer journey tracking, customer health scoring, NPS tracking, renewal and expansion management, and robust customer communication capabilities. Salesforce, on the other hand, provides a comprehensive CRM platform with a wide range of sales, marketing, and customer service features, but may not have the same depth and specialization in customer success management as Gainsight.