How a living plan works
Every Company gets at most one plan. It seeds itself from data your workspace already has - ARR, renewal date, health, adoption, recent activity - and anything GainTrace does not know shows as empty (“ARR not tracked”, “No renewal date”) rather than being invented. The plan then maintains itself. GainTrace re-syncs every plan automatically about every six hours: it refreshes the facts line, recomputes metric-bound objectives, advances the lifecycle stage, logs notable events (critical signals, first feature use, objectives achieved), and suggests a review when one is warranted. Use Refresh on a plan to re-sync it on demand. A plan moves through three stages:
When the renewal date passes or moves out of the window, the plan settles back into Adoption.
Start plans
1
Open Plans
Open the Plans hub from Cmd+K or Setup > Customer success, then click Start plans. You can also open a Company, go to its Plan tab, and click Review the draft.
2
Pick Companies
The dialog lists Companies that have no plan yet, largest ARR first.
- Select one Company and click Review the draft to curate a full evidence-based draft.
- Select several and click Start plans to create lean plans (facts and lifecycle only) that you flesh out later.
3
Curate the draft (single Company)
The draft page proposes objectives, stakeholders, and first commitments from real data - adoption gaps, health, the renewal date, your contact graph - with an evidence line under every proposal. It also lists What we can’t see yet, so gaps are named instead of papered over. Keep or drop each item, add Why they bought in your own words, and adjust the first-value target date.
4
Create it
Click Create the plan. Only the items you kept are created.
Trace AI may tighten the draft’s wording, grounded only in the evidence shown. If it cannot run, you get the same draft with plainer wording - the proposals themselves are always assembled from your data, never generated from scratch.
Read the Plans hub
The hub opens with five stats: Plans, ARR under plan, In renewal window, Objectives at risk, and Reviews waiting. Below them:- Needs attention lists one row per reason: a suggested review, overdue commitments (yours or the customer’s), objectives off pace, or a renewal countdown. Reviews sort first, then customer-owed work, then risk.
- Portfolio is the whole book in one table - Company, Stage, Objectives, ARR, Health, Renewal, Last review, Owner - ordered by ARR.
Set objectives
Objectives are the customer’s goals, in their words. A plan holds at most 7 active objectives; archive one to add another.
Objectives from the drafted plan can be bound to a real metric (feature adoption, a usage metric, or the health score); their status is the system’s verdict, recomputed on every sync, and cannot be hand-edited. Objectives you add with Add on the plan are manual: you set the status yourself, and the change is recorded with your name and a timestamp.
Track commitments
Commitments are the mutual action plan, split into We owe them and They owe us. Each carries an optional owner and due date; mark items done or drop them. Commitments on your side also appear in your Tasks queue, so plan work lands in your daily list without double entry. Overdue commitments on either side surface in Needs attention on the hub.Map stakeholders and log wins
Stakeholders tracks who matters on the customer side: Champion, Economic buyer, Exec sponsor, Day to day, or Detractor, each with a pulse of Engaged, Quiet, or Left. Setting a champion’s pulse to Left logs the change and suggests a Save review. Wins and risks is the plan’s running ledger. GainTrace writes entries automatically - critical signals as risks, first feature use as adoption gains, objectives achieved, stage changes - and you can log wins, risks, milestones, and notes yourself. Pin a win or milestone to make sure it leads the next review. Reviews pull highlights from the period since the last delivered review; risks and notes stay in the ledger.Run reviews
Reviews are suggested by events, never by the calendar. Each suggestion names its reason:
You can start any review kind manually at any time.
1
Prepare
Click Prepare on a suggested review, or Skip it with a one-line reason, which is stored on the review record. Preparing assembles a one-pager from the ledger, objectives, and live facts.
2
Compose
Numbers in the document come from live data and are not editable. The narrative lines - the opening one-liner and the usage story - are yours to write, or click Draft with Trace AI to generate them from the facts. Trace AI writes only the narrative - the numbers stay locked to live data. Refresh data rebuilds the numbers and keeps your narrative.
3
Present or share
Present turns the document into a full-screen, keyboard-driven walkthrough. Share creates a customer link to the one-pager.
4
Mark delivered
Mark delivered closes the loop: the review becomes the permanent record of what was shown, and any next-period items you added become commitments on the plan (your side lands in Tasks too).
Share the plan with your customer
Click Share with customer on a plan. GainTrace copies a link your customer can open without logging in. The page shows the plan’s objectives, open and completed commitments, recent wins, and the facts line, styled with your workspace’s brand kit. It updates as the plan changes - it is a living document, not a snapshot. Reviews share the same way from the composer, showing the one-pager as delivered. Customer opens are recorded: the composer shows how many times a review was opened, the Portfolio shows when a plan was last viewed, and opens count as engagement on the plan.FAQ
Can a Company have more than one plan? No. Each Company has exactly one living plan, and drafting a second is blocked. Do I have to fill in ARR, renewal dates, or health by hand? No. The facts line reads from the Company record, which your connectors keep current. Fields with no source stay honestly empty. Why does an objective show “Not started” when work has begun? Its metric has no data yet. GainTrace never converts missing data into progress; connect the relevant source or switch the objective to manual status. Why is there no quarterly review cadence? Reviews are triggered by customer milestones - onboarding wrapping, the renewal window, disengagement, a champion change - because a calendar date is not a reason to meet. Start a Business review manually whenever you want one.Good to know
- Plans re-sync automatically about every six hours; Refresh on a plan re-syncs it immediately.
- Churn risk appears on the facts line only when the predictor has enough data to stand behind a number.
- A plan holds at most 7 active objectives.
- Skipping a review records your reason on the review record; skipped reviews don’t appear in the plan’s review list.
- The shared page is excluded from search engine indexing, but the link itself is the only access control.
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The Company records that plans are built on.
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Where plans fit in a CSM’s daily flow.