Donna Weber: [00:00:00] at one company I work with, they had three different sets of getting started guides built by three different teams delivered on three different platforms. And so what does that lead to duplication of efforts? Things are out of date because who has time to it. Update it and frustrated customers.
Cause they don’t know where to go for what?
Dave Derington: [00:00:28] Hello and welcome to CELab the customer education laboratory, where we explore how to. Build customer education programs, experiment with new approaches and exterminate the this, and add advice. It stopped growth dead in its tracks. I am Dave Derington and I have with me, Donald Weber.
Donna Weber: [00:00:47] Hi Dave,
Dave Derington: [00:00:49] thanks for joining us today.
I think we’re going to have a really great conversation, but before we start, I always we always like to talk about what the national day out and today is. National avocado day national mud day. And I’m curious about, national raspberry cake day.
Donna Weber: [00:01:09] That’s very interesting. And which of those is your favorite?
Dave Derington: [00:01:12] I am a big fan of raspberries, although blackberries are in season here in Washington state, but, Hey, you know that they are a rich source of vitamin C manganese and dietary fiber. So what else than having a day for that?
Donna Weber: [00:01:24] I’m going after the avocados. I love avocados. and, I just love them.
Dave Derington: [00:01:29] I love avocados do so this is a, it’s a big day, all the fruits and national mud day, of course, but we digress.
So let’s get into this. So today we’re going to talk Donna about customer education, but you and I had a talk months ago and I think this is relevant and it’s going to continue to be relevant. We’re going to focus in, on customer success teams, those professionals that are out there, and specifically those of you who are gearing up trying to get into the education scene.
so if you are a customer success leader, perk up, pay attention, listen in, Donna’s going to educate you on some really cool strategies and the techniques that she uses and let’s get into this. So Donna frame up for us, what’s your. Can you tell us a little bit about your company and a bit, but tell us about your passion in this space?
Donna Weber: [00:02:25] Dave, as I am passionate about helping companies front-load their relationships with their customers. And so then they can ensure that renewals are going to happen. And that they do that with scalable onboarding and customer education program.
Dave Derington: [00:02:41] Fabulous. So this is super critical.
It’s super relevant and let’s unpack this a little bit. So as always, what I like to do is take what you’ve said and let’s frame this kind of scientifically again, we’re big on data. You’re big on data. you have a lot of great statistics in your blog entries and such that we’ll share with our listeners, through some links later.
The hypothesis we’re going to test today is developing scalable education programs to onboard your customers results in more efficiency, higher adoption, and higher renewal rates. So that sound good.
Donna Weber: [00:03:19] Yeah, that sounds good. I would also, maybe we could add a, it can help you scale your customer success organization and teams as
Dave Derington: [00:03:26] well.
That’s super critical for the people that are listening in. So let’s unpack this, but before we do Donna, why don’t you give us a little bit of a background on you? How you got here, your company laid on us. We went in, we want to learn more. Yeah.
Donna Weber: [00:03:42] So I have been working in the customer education enablement space for quite a while.
I have launched customer education organizations and programs at two startups. And, I’m been a long time member of the customer education management association also called Sedna. I’m also on the board as the marketing trustee. So I’ve been passionate about enabling customers for a long time. And I’ve been the one that companies where everyone’s talking about Oh, we’ve got them super sales.
I got it. Marketing has got to improve our product and I’ve been the one at the meetings, the reason my hand going, hello? What about our customers? What about our customers? So that’s always been my passion, even in the world of customer success. I’m still, so what about the customers?
Dave Derington: [00:04:25] it’s all about our customer and the customer can also mean different things.
It could not just be an end user. It could be a partner, it could be an internal employee, but, this is super important. So tell us a little bit more, again, CEDMA is a great organization and we’ll have a link to that. If you’re interested, Nashville, right this year for the
Donna Weber: [00:04:43] contract, November mid, like a mid November and Nashville, I will be speaking on.
The topic there’s content everywhere. we’ll dive into that a little bit.
Dave Derington: [00:04:51] There is content everywhere. Cool. So we’ll send a link out to that. And if you don’t know about it, that’s a great conference to join. but tell us more about your company and the kind of consultancy that you offer our community.
Donna Weber: [00:05:05] Yeah, thank you. about three and a half years ago, I launched my own business. I went off on my own to do consulting and I just racialist learner. I love learning. I love, variety and I felt, and I love the bill. that’s where I like to hang out in, like going to start a building, offering them programs and teams.
And then the maintaining was not so much my, My joy spot sparked joy. And I realized, Hey, if I do consulting, I can get to stay in my Joyce part of that new, exciting beginning of a building.
Dave Derington: [00:05:39] that I really liked that maybe this is why you and I, and even Adam are very kindred spirits, because.
You can go work in an organization that’s been there for a while and, they have there educational team, but there’s something really exciting about coming into an organization. That’s a startup that’s new that doesn’t have anything. And from scratch, building that out of nowhere and helping people really learn the product
Donna Weber: [00:06:04] right.
Exactly. It’s very exciting. And also taking it may not be that there’s nothing there, but really helping organizations turn around scale, take, get to the next level.
Dave Derington: [00:06:16] Yeah. And you’re right. there’s always something there, but let’s dive in. let’s tear this apart. Let’s talk about point number one, which you, when we talked earlier and shared traded notes to your point about there’s content and there’s content everywhere.
This is your subject for later. I’m not going to spoil that one, but recreating the wheel is something that I’ve encountered over and over again. Tell me a little bit about that with context of your customer success org and. Training, we’ve got to get training and education out. Tell me a little bit more about how this all works.
How do we avoid this constant loop of, Oh, I’m going to start over and make my own new content when there’s something already there.
Donna Weber: [00:07:01] Sure. So first of all, As I shared, I was, I’ve been working with enabling customers long before anyone talks about customer success. And when folks do start talking, I’ve been very involved from the beginning I was at, I think I’ve been to five pulse conferences now.
Dave Derington: [00:07:23] I said he got me beat on there. I have three.
Donna Weber: [00:07:27] I’d go to these conferences and I was just really perplexed. Like people were talking about the CSMs, they might talk about sales, they might talk about services, they might talk about support. And they’re like, why aren’t people talking about customer education?
We’ve been out there on the front lines, in the trenches building content and having that relationship with customers, not in the account management way, but in a really, making sure that they. Are moving towards product adoption for a long time. and then, so I just want to step back a bit to what springboard solutions does.
So we help B to B business software companies increase customer lifetime value through orchestrated onboarding and customer enablement programs. And the reason why I’m so passionate about what I do is because. As customer success has become quite a, an exciting growing, industry. I see over and over when I talk to companies, the CSMs are often trying to figure all this out on their own.
like no one’s ever done it before. They’re trying to recreate the wheel. oftentimes each CSM is single handedly trying to train their accounts. So every CSN is doing their own thing. There’s no consistency. There’s no repeatability. I see I’ve met with teams that like they’ve never created training and they’re just, somebody says go create training.
They don’t know what they’re doing. they’re trying to create this high production videos or, there’s. Really busy defining the product and not focus on the users and we’ll dive more into some of these areas, but, it just continues to surprise me that folks don’t know about this scalable, repeatable, consistent approach that we have in customer education.
And it’s awesome. Your scale I’ve written articles, Adam’s written articles, some given talks about it that, we say the secret to scaling. customer success is customer education. Customer education is the scale engine of customer success. in many ways like customer education with the advent of customer success in many ways, customer education has then, Kind
Dave Derington: [00:09:39] of leap frog or pushed up into little?
Donna Weber: [00:09:42] I would say like in many ways with customer success has gotten really big customer education has drifted into the shadows a little bit, just not quite as sexy and as, the new hot thing as customer success. But on the other hand, I see that customer education is more vital than ever because.
Customer success teams are seeing that, Oh wow. We have to enable our customers. We have to educate them. The product adoption is key.
Dave Derington: [00:10:12] Yeah. I think this was, this is one of the single most important lessons that I think I learned. When I came, when I started working in customer education and the biggest opportunity I had was at Gainsight.
And that’s when we met and we started talking and even, and I don’t want to throw anybody at Gainsight under the bus, because this is not a singular company’s problem. All the companies I’ve worked at and more of them are asking about education now, which is the big difference, but most of them have done exactly what you said.
You’ve got. Let’s say we’ve got Joe and Judy and Jim and Jane, and they’re all CSMs. They’re sitting on the bench and their manager, Rachel comes up to them. She’s not a J word. Thanks. She comes up and says, Hey, I’ve heard about how education really helps. Can we do some webinars?
Can we do some training? And then what I’ve seen is even in a, in an organization where I was doing training already, and other teams were doing training as well and education. The CSMs were still doing it on their own. And I think that’s a natural, this isn’t a shame thing at all. This is a natural growth problem that we have.
So when in my perspective, what I’ve seen is folks say, I’ve got to learn, teach somebody about it, and they feel so motivated and so compelled to help their customers because that’s what the DNA of a CSM is that they just go that extra step and they do it. That’s a problem to me because to your point, they’re recreating the wheel.
And they don’t have the pattern of the wheel sometime. They don’t know what color it should be. these are the things that we, as educators have picked up and learned, and we want to desperately share.
Donna Weber: [00:11:49] Correct. I also think part of the challenges as CSMs are we’re in the early stages, CSMs are like, everything’s being thrown at this CSM.
And so they’re trying to do it all. And then that’s part of the challenge. They can’t be as successful as they need to be. They need to stay in that strategic, trusted advisor role and not trying to do everything. And their whole could be better as tour guides pointing to the training resources. That maybe another team develops or even another CSN develops that have been trying to do that all.
earlier this week I did an, a webinar about ongoing onboarding and another challenge when CSM are individually training, every. Customer what happens when there’s user turnover. So not only do they have their set of new accounts, they need to onboard and maybe train. Now they have, new users at existing accounts and they’re just going to be spiraling in trouble if they don’t find it a scalable, consistent, repeatable way and
Dave Derington: [00:12:53] a process to support that too.
Yeah. what for me, one of the things that I thought. So I think to your point, I love this term. I think we should really elevate the term ongoing onboarding because we think of onboarding. I at least I have thought, Oh, I have a new account. They got onboarded. We’re done. No, you’ve got churn internally.
Somebody quit, somebody got hired, you got a new technical administrator, a hundred, for example, I’ll just use a case at outreach. We are managing or working with companies that are massive in scale. I won’t name any of them, but you’ll know them. but we’re talking thousands of seats and people using all this stuff.
And with the roles that we educate. The sales development rep in particular, that’s a high churn position. So we can expect that, my dream and I’ve done this at other places is, Hey, you have a system where we have context or prospects or all the information about who’s going to be using our software.
In fact, we know that who has the licenses, we have a table somewhere. Would it be great to, Hey, once a seat has been created to initiate an automated onboarding play. And then that doesn’t obviate the need for additional, a live training or a virtual instructor led training group training, all that jazz.
But goodness, you’re going to have this stuff in your inbox, helping you out a little bit, and you get that whenever you start. Not whenever the company boards.
Donna Weber: [00:14:14] And then also, there’s an article that, from LinkedIn, that indicates in the high-tech world that we’re in user turnover can be about 13%.
I would say it’s probably up to 20% or more for a sales rep. And so if you have a hundred users, that means you’re going to have 13 new ones this year, when you include reorgs and changes the roles. I would say you’ve got 13 to 25 new users this year. How are you going to get each of those users onboarded and trained?
Dave Derington: [00:14:45] Yeah, that’s hard. It’s really hard. And there’s plays for that and we’re going to talk more about them, but I do have one question before I move to the next topic. What Donna, do you think the big hangup is with? Is this an educating issue? We have to get this out to everybody in customer success and say, Hey, education is really important, and this is why.
what are we missing here? Why don’t we have more onboarding and work towards stopping, recreating the wheel?
Donna Weber: [00:15:18] yeah, I, I w maybe one is such a fast moving space is so new and exciting and fast moving and folks are not looking to leverage what else exists. There might be that, is there a perception of customer education, that we need to, Update our image that we’re not being valued.
Yeah. So there might be components from both sides could be,
Dave Derington: [00:15:44] yeah, I think both of those are viable. yeah. I, one of the things that I’ve experienced in working in startups over and over is education is the last thing that they, that anybody thinks about. And I recall I was talking with I through a friend of mine, who’s a VC person and he helps.
New companies get going. Of course, we had a really great discussion about well are CEOs and senior leadership aware of education. And he said, surprisingly not really. They’re so worried about getting, okay, let’s get the product and engineer going. What’s the, how do I sell this? Who’s my market. CEO probably doesn’t typically be mindful of.
I look at education as a product education as part of the product, in fact, It should be dealt with developed alongside of it. If you do that, then it’s natural. But, we move fast in SaaS. We try to get stuff out, we try to close deals and then all of a sudden we have this tech debt. We have the educational debt.
I think it’s just something that naturally happens. And I think it’s part of awareness, but that’s just my take.
Donna Weber: [00:16:45] Yeah, I think, I think that’s fair enough. I know that VCs are asking companies more and more, early stage startups. What’s your customer success plan, and they’re not asking what your customer education plan, what could, for customer educational professionals and areas to focus on is helping companies understand the impact that you have.
So oftentimes customer education professionals. Yeah, like customer success, they know that they’re here to drive renewals and retention upsells cross-sells right. they know that they’re talking words like, lifetime value, net retention
Dave Derington: [00:17:22] value, all that kind of stuff.
Donna Weber: [00:17:24] Yeah. And customer education professionals often don’t use those words.
We need to, really address, the impact on the bottom line. So if we’re talking about language and demonstrating that to our. to the, management teams and they’ll start to value more, that, customer education professionals tend to, stay comfortable in silos of building content and delivering content and get excited to share evaluation scores.
But at the end of a quarter to see CEO doesn’t care about evaluation scores. so part of it is talking the language that the company talks about. Yeah. and, it may be that, for example, I might, the last company I worked at, it was all about ARR annual recurring revenue. So I was like, okay, I have to start talking to ARR, so what does that mean?
one, I was able to demonstrate that well-trained customers had a 20% higher renewal rate. And companies I work with find that train customers have anywhere from I’ve even heard up to 80 and 150% higher renewal rates. But when the attach rates are low, what’s the impact you’re having. So really driving higher, training usage to have a greater impact.
And then also I created a product, a subscription product, so that I was adding revenue to that AR bucket and then made a big difference
Dave Derington: [00:18:46] and that’s measurable directly measurable. Yeah, that’s that kind of stuff. That’s gold. And that’s some, that’s that cognitive shift that I think we have to start having is I have a lot of dialogues about revenue when you first start out, I’m not so worried about getting a lot of revenue.
I’m worried about getting the content built because they don’t have it. But once you start doing that, then you start thinking about, yeah, I can affect the bottom line. And we can beat this to that, but I feel there’s a bridge in here because you started talking about renewals and. We’re talking about onboarding.
Onboarding is an adoption play. Getting everybody to use it. Tell me more about, so you have a quote here. I think this is pretty sticky. So why don’t you say it for appropriate
Donna Weber: [00:19:28] impact? Which, which one that customers adopt quickly.
Dave Derington: [00:19:32] Yep.
Donna Weber: [00:19:33] Okay, great. Yeah. this year’s pulse conference. I was attending a session delivered by Mark Rawls of Vista equity partners.
She’s in a consulting group and it made me jump out of my chair, almost sad. He says, when customers adopt quickly, they renew forever. And so it’s really important that we know we’re not taking our time to get customers onboarded and enabled using the product that front-loading of the relationship, because what’s going to drive the renewal.
Dave Derington: [00:20:04] Why is that though? What is specific to that in your experience? That makes it so sticky.
Donna Weber: [00:20:11] there’s a few things. And I was talking with ed powers. Who’s a customer success leader in the Denver area. I was in Denver. So later this year and we’ve chatted there and also, had a follow-up meeting.
About he, so he’s really into understanding the neuroscience of relationships with customers. So that was, that got me really intrigued about the neuroscience of onboarding. Yeah. So as it’s sharing things about first impressions, so for example, and let’s just even dial back a little bit of that there’s the whole buyer’s remorse thing.
So depending on your product, that the buyers reputation might be online. They might’ve spent a lot of time research analysis to select your product and then, the deal closes. And then what happens oftentimes there’s a big gap before anyone really engages you. That’s the time when you’re most excited to you’re, you’ve been talking with the sales rep and you’re really excited to be.
How’d that impact that’s been sold to you and oftentimes, nothing happens. And, so what ha what happens because the companies are not jumping in to really, Hold, have a prescriptive way to engage customers right away. The customers are left with all of this kind of dead air dead space, and they start ruminating.
what happens is, and this is all according to ed as is not for me. what happens when you start ruminating? Will you start creating stories? And you started off on creating, these worst case scenarios. And, I don’t know about you, but when I buy things, I’m a big researcher.
So if I’ve done all my research, I said, I’m getting a new car or even a new pair of shoes. I’ve done my research. I’ve read the reviews. I’ve talked to everybody. I know. And then I buy the thing and there’s that kind of anticipation of what it’s going solve or resolve for me then buyer’s remorse can quickly set in.
Dave Derington: [00:22:07] Yeah, and isn’t it like this, I’ve had a strange relationship with software all my life. And I think it’s because I had, I remember having a Vic 20 I’m dating myself victim right now, but when I was a kid, I had the Atari, I had the Vic 20 when I had my Vic 20 of my Commodore 64 software was more of a thing because you could download stuff.
not so much download. There was no. What 300 bought internet. Good Lord. But there was more of a, an assortment of things that you can load and play with and break and try. And I think what drew me into computer education and ultimately customer education is that I had that, like you inquisitive mind, like what happens?
I do this, what happens if I do this? But one of the biggest things that’s always been frustrating and this particularly happens. Now just ju just for more context, I was a university professor teaching game design and web development, and such one of the hardest things ever that I saw with students is you have a tool.
So let’s, I’ll pull out game maker. Game maker is a pretty inexpensive game. Creation tool. That’s not quite open source, but it’s cheap enough that anybody has access to it. And, but when you get into it and you start on, where do I go? What, how do I learn this? When I first started playing with this, there was nothing, there was some docs online.
and then it was about, Gosh, I don’t, I’m bounced. I bounced off of it immediately because it was hard. There was no learning path. There was no start here, Dave, and do this thing. And so then what I had to do is of course have a university courses, okay, I’m gonna break this down, let me give people discreet things to do.
We’re gonna have fun with it, and you’re breaking that up into logical pathways, but it’s very hard because you’re unlike other fields where if you were a teacher, you have a textbook on mathematics. On English. You know how to do that here? We have nothing we’re starting from scratch or we’re pulling materials from people’s heads.
but when I get the product, Oh my gosh. I’m excited about it. I’m stoked. I’m getting other people excited about it. And I want to continue to use it
Donna Weber: [00:24:09] again. Yes. and so with B2B software, we talk a lot about the first 90 days. With, mobile device app, it could be 30 seconds, it could be 90 seconds that you really need to get those users onboarded and enabled
Dave Derington: [00:24:26] that’s.
So there is a big spread. And so if it’s a platform or, like outreach, for example, as a platform, and it’s a, it’s an enablement platform, engagement platform. It has all of these things it can do, but if you have a mobile app and you say, okay, I want it to show me the weather. I have to turn it on and do a couple of things, configure it.
I’m good to go. And it’s going to stay on my phone forever if I struggled with that amount.
Donna Weber: [00:24:50] Exactly.
and so back to the neuroscience, a couple of other points there is that first impressions count. we know that there’s parts of our brain that are logical and parts that are not as logical.
And those first impressions, we start making decisions immediately. About this product, that this company, that the vendor, whatever. And then what we do until we’re really, fed. If we’re not being fed fully prescrip prescriptive guidance, we will look to validate our first impressions. So let’s say I meet you, Dave.
And I think you’re an awesome guy then whatever you do or say until you really prove, otherwise, I’m going to just assume that’s validating how awesome you are. But if I don’t like you, then I’m going to just start everything that, our interactions, I’m going to start looking for ways to validate my negative person question.
So that’s why we have to, not just customer education, but the whole customer facing teams need to create. I call it the orchestrated onboarding framework. To create this customer experience immediately to embrace the customer and guide them along to reach their desired business goals and outcomes
Dave Derington: [00:26:03] away.
That’s great. So you have you help guide your customers and others into, Hey, this is the best way that you could shepherd people through the experience. So like you were going through the Gates at us sporting event or a Disney, or, you want people to you set expectations, you get them excited.
and this is a repeatable process for everybody. So there’s no ambiguity, you have data to support it. And it makes sense.
Donna Weber: [00:26:29] Yeah. And also, oftentimes all the customer facing teams are all like doing their own thing. So it’s time to get out of the silos customer education. We’re used to doing our own thing.
It’s not all about just creating the courseware anymore. It’s not about owning that anymore. We need to be working in a harmonious way with other customer facing teams. Has an article, which I highly recommend called from touchpoints to journey. And it says that even though you might get a high score on your class or on a support call, when customers are not getting that orchestrated experience, that orchestrated journey, then there, the companies are finding their customer satisfaction is lower.
They don’t want customers don’t want touch points anymore. They want the journey defined and it wouldn’t be guided along the journey.
Dave Derington: [00:27:20] Yeah, we all want that. it’s a little bit of a holding, but now that we have the tools and the automation and the on-demand content, it makes it so much easier to take somebody through.
And to the point where they say, Oh, no, I’m done. I’m out. I’ve got it. And they come back and get help as they go through their journey. But it’s a partnership.
with that in mind. How about you now, share your wisdom of the, who we’ve talked about, the what and the why, all the, what’s the problem and what do we, how are we thinking about it?
What are your recommended ways, scalable ways that you would encourage our audience here to engage with onboarding or onboarding their customers?
Donna Weber: [00:28:05] Sure. Let me see, I’m just looking at the notes here. I love your ad hoc address, maybe we’ll come to that in a moment. So
Dave Derington: [00:28:14] Adam’s word
Donna Weber: [00:28:15] from that ad hoc address.
okay, so that’s on the little side. Maybe we keep that in or not. Okay. So I’m just going to start talking about the ways that customer education can scale. User adoption.
Dave Derington: [00:28:30] Cool.
Donna Weber: [00:28:32] customer education is a one to many models. So while customer success starts as one-to-one or a one to few approach, customer education is designed to be a one to many approach.
And so you have instructional designers or course developers repeat creating repeatable content and give that to instructors. You have this consistent repeatable. Content that is delivered to many, customers. And if you have self-paced and that increases exponentially. Yeah. So there’s a one, it’s a, it is built to be a one to many model.
Dave Derington: [00:29:08] Sorry about that, then. Sorry to interrupt, but that’s fundamentally different because going back to some of the previous points and I’m just peppering in some highlights that I’ve seen, you’re going back to recreating the wheel. If I were a CSM and I go, Oh my gosh, I need training. So you cobbled together a deck where you steal it from somebody else and add to it.
And that’s not scalable. That’s not repeatable. It’s not consistent. So you’re saying now, and that’s not one to many. And what I see a lot of the times is in onboarding teams and CSM CS teams, folks are doing this one-to-one one-to-one one-to-one. And one of the things that came up in a previous podcast was how some customer success managers feel like that’s a value they provide.
And they’re very reluctant, but it’s such a different paradigm shift. Don’t train the one, train the many, but then come back with that one person after they’ve gone through the training. And time with them and coach them. And your job is not necessarily be BD teacher because you can optimize your
Donna Weber: [00:30:06] time.
as I said before, CSMs need to be strategic advisors, not instructors. And so when, if you don’t have a customer education team or a team of instructional designers, then there’s often time that one CSM who loves to create content. And so have that dedicated resource on the CSM team. But having them have them create the content for the rest of the team to deliver.
So there’s consistency and repeatability there. Yeah,
Dave Derington: [00:30:39] that’s cool. That’s great. con they could still be a C a in a CS role, but they’re a content
Donna Weber: [00:30:43] expert. Yes. And then again, you might have the users take some more of these generic classes, but then the CSM might follow up to make sure that the customer knows how to apply it to their unique use cases in their business.
And then that way you’re staying strategic.
Dave Derington: [00:31:03] That’s I, and that is really good. And that’s a really good partnership. So as you start having in, I’ve actually have a member of my team, my first instructional designer, she came from being the customer success manager and has been really helpful because she’s established those relationships.
And now we’re bridging over into a new team, but we have that mind share, and folks are starting to say, Oh, I’m going to give all this to Vanessa and we’re going to develop content for it. So
Donna Weber: [00:31:29] that’s great.
Dave Derington: [00:31:30] Yeah.
Donna Weber: [00:31:32] So then next is, next is repeatable content, which we’ve covered and then role-based so, and I know Adam, Would agree with me here that he wrote an article, said, customers don’t care about your product.
so too often the training that I see customer success teams create, Hey, Dave, let me show you how to log in. I’m going to give you an overview near the product. an overview isn’t telling me how to do my job better. So because people learn best when it has content that’s, with them, what’s in it for me.
So it needs to be about, your role, your job, and not just about the product. It needs to be about say, use case scenarios that your users are using and specific to the different roles.
Dave Derington: [00:32:19] So that’s so again, frame, adding more to that is I, so I’ll talk from outreach. I have a role that’s a sales development rep, right?
Hunter they’re very focused on doing certain steps to book a meeting and. Sell some software. So they’re focused on certain things and there, and we want to encourage certain behaviors and outcomes. And that focus allows us to have kind of a different context of training for that role as opposed to other stuff.
So we’re very, speciate thing very much. Vitiating our projectors from product to those kinds of people.
Donna Weber: [00:32:56] Absolutely. And when you modularize it, you might have similar content, or even some of the same content. So if I’m a say I’m an administrator versus a business analyst. there might be some getting starting conduct.
That’s the same. And again, you can repurpose it for the different roles. So when I log in, I see, Oh, this is handled that’s me. I’m going to, the training and I know it’s about me. Yeah.
Dave Derington: [00:33:20] And that’s where a lot of the good LMS systems that we have out there allow for that kind of a sharing. I actually, I don’t know if you recall the intent behind wikis.
So a Wiki, MediaWiki is a good one, a Wikipedia, all, we all know that, right? one of the intents behind that was modular curation of content, where you can literally plug in little tiny pieces of content that are relevant to other things and reuse them. And the way that I like to focus on education is make those repeatable modules that can be applied.
For example, I might have three roles that are very similar module. One is the same across the board. It’s an intro module. Module two might apply to role one, but not role two, and you can cater. Learning pathways to each one of these kinds of things. So it’s interesting.
Donna Weber: [00:34:07] So role-based and learning pathways.
And so we don’t want our users drinking from a fire hose. Part of that prescriptive journey is to give them what they need when they need it.
Dave Derington: [00:34:18] Yeah. And that even has a sidebar for me in thinking sometimes, we’re worried about just in time training, by and large, but often you might have a workshop or a class.
And I know at enterprise that we’ll go on site and we’ll deliver training. But what I also like to do is give people, access. Everybody has access to university. Everybody has the learning pathways across the board, even if they’ve sat in on a training class and now they can go through that. If that helps them, we didn’t solve their problem.
Donna Weber: [00:34:46] Yeah. That’s a great approach.
Dave Derington: [00:34:49] tell me more about, so after role-based and, outcomes based type training, you’ve got to wonder why many model, so we’re changing it for and generalizing it. And there’s an objection to that sometimes because. I have heard, Oh, my customer is different.
Oh, they have this different kind of thing. That’s, that’s something that you tend to have to deal with. But when we do get beyond that objection to the repeatable content and then get role-based trainings, teased out the next one is your point about hands-on. What is it? And how do you do that?
What’s important about
Donna Weber: [00:35:22] it. again, when a CSM is saying, Hey, Dave, let me show you how to log in. I’m going to give you an overview of the product. That’s great, but there’s no retention. The learning pyramid shows that when there’s a demo, user retention is around 30%. So when users have the hands-on experience like in a lab and a class than retention goes up to about 75%.
So if I don’t remember something, then I’m going to keep asking the same thing of my CSM, the support agents. So it’s going to be very expensive to the company when users, they have that walk through, they have that overview, but they’re not really retaining it. They’re going to keep reaching out and using your extensive resources.
Dave Derington: [00:36:09] Yeah. That’s using our CSM as training and using your support team as training is not efficient and that’s not a problem to the
Donna Weber: [00:36:17] customer and it’s not scalable. And then I, as you were saying, some companies, you’re just thinking about the repeatable. Some companies might be like, every customer is unique.
great. Then create is really white gloves. High touch, really customized offering and then charge a lot for them. those are premium packages and make sure you’re covering your costs so that you can be investing into building great offerings and maybe even bringing in some extra revenues so you can build your team.
Dave Derington: [00:36:44] Okay. I’m going to echo that back, Donna, because that’s super important. Customization is your enemy and customer ad, but if you are going to do it and the request is there.
Donna Weber: [00:36:56] Yeah. If that’s what customers want. and I just want to say another thing, you really need to listen to your customers.
I, as something I’m very passionate about one company I work with, they’re like, okay, we need training. So it builds out all this stuff, paste stuff. And then they brought me in to help them out. And I interviewed customers and we found that customers who received instructor led training hands-on instructor, led training their use of the product.
And their perception of the product was so much higher. they were like heroes in the organization for what they could do using this product. I noticed who’d had it. They were seen as what’s wrong with you? why can’t you figure anything out? so it’s not always, we need, a lot of teams think, Oh, self-paced training, let’s do some videos together.
You really need to know your product, your audience, what they want to need is not always, it’s not always that you need. this hands-on instructor led. It’s not always that you need self paced. You really need to know what they want and need.
Dave Derington: [00:37:53] that’s a huge point. And I think that’s something for us in customer ed, because we talk going back to Adam’s CO’s that you said before customer is the scale engine for customer success.
And when you start looking at that in strict literal sense, Oh, I should do everything on demand. I should do all one to many classes. But to your point, and I’ve experienced this in a number of cases, particularly more recently, there is merit behind it. So for example, my audience here at outreach are people that are seller.
they are salespeople. Do they want to sit in training? No.
Donna Weber: [00:38:29] And for them your training, my module might be 90 seconds. It
Dave Derington: [00:38:34] might be 92nd. Or the flip side is a lot of these schemes, same companies. So we value our sellers time. We’re having an offsite come to our offsite. Let’s do the training done. And those trainings are, we had one last week and my trainer came back super joyful.
She was so thrilled because the team that she was there had said pictures. And we loved you. We love the training excited about this now. And when we saw it and you were there to help us out, it was amazing. So those kinds of experiences are heartwarming. And really, and they’re really useful. But remember that I’m talking to the general audience, remember to be judicious in your use of that.
If you’re going to do that needs to be a paid option.
Donna Weber: [00:39:15] It can, and still be repeatable. You can still have somebody create a foundation course, but then certain components are customized or tailored for each, customer. You don’t have to recreate the wheel every time.
Dave Derington: [00:39:29] Totally. So what’s next.
Donna Weber: [00:39:32] All right.
So then, Let’s talk about the content is everywhere or the ad hoc, where everyone’s an author, the thing is everyone can write something, they can video something, they can publish it. So we’re in an, everyone’s an author era. There’s content everywhere. I’m at one company I work with, they had three different sets of getting started guides.
Built by three different teams delivered on three different platforms. And so what does that lead to duplication of efforts? Things are out of date because who has time to update it and frustrated customers because they don’t know where to go for what. these days, because it’s not like customer education is the only, we’re the only ones who have the ability to create content anymore.
I recommend creating a content council and in that spirit of moving from touchpoints to journeys, gather everyone who’s creating customer facing content that might be product marketing team. It might be marketing. It might be CSM might be customer education that might be support writing knowledge articles, and start to determine, what, doing the asset inventory.
Hey, what’s out there. What are the formats? And then start determining. How you going to divide and conquer? It is like we just, don’t not have the time to duplicate efforts anymore. Product release cycles are faster than ever and going faster. and I like to use what I call the cheap and cheerful approach.
I call it the Tarjay for target.
We’ll call it the agile and iterate. It’s your approach?
Dave Derington: [00:41:10] That sounds impeccable.
Donna Weber: [00:41:15] But, but, the thing is customers would rather have current content. And helps them do their job than a fancy high production course. That’s out of date and very generic.
Dave Derington: [00:41:28] Oh my goodness. Can I tell you a story? So not too long ago, I was looking at some material and. I’ve. I say to people exactly what you say, look going, gonna forgive you a lot.
They’re going to give you incredible amount of grace. If it does. If the content is a little rough around the edges, but I can hear the audio and I can see the slides. If you have a deck, good enough, fine. It doesn’t have to be masterful. but then I saw. at this one place, I saw a bunch of videos that looked like marketing videos.
You have a talking head or a talking body, a green screen, hybrid production value. It looked immaculate, but there was absolutely no content. There was no content. I didn’t learn a darn thing. And I go, what was that? What did I just watch? It just, it looked pretty, but I think, and there’s a couple of nuances that I’ve seen in this, that number one, I’d say, Hey, if you’re developing content, don’t worry.
Don’t overthink it. Don’t. No, don’t worry about jazzing it up too much. Get the straw, get the sound piece of content out there that
Donna Weber: [00:42:27] that has an impact.
Dave Derington: [00:42:28] It has an incredible amount of impact because I’ve seen teams that have spent weeks and months developing content in a very waterfall type.
Okay, we got to do this. Okay, go ahead. Got that done. Okay. Review now we’ve got a good do this. Okay, great. No, let’s get it all. Dump it out. Have everybody look at it and get it in the hands of the customer as fast as you can, and you can iterate again and make it super awesome. But when you’re trying to move super fast for the first time, and you’re getting this stuff pouring out of people’s minds and hearts, just get it on paper.
Or like I saw, I like to say, put it in paper or pixels. Get it written down.
Donna Weber: [00:43:03] Yeah. And so there’s some key points here that you need to know your audience. So if your audience is a bunch of developers, they D they don’t want high production value for sales reps. They might want a little higher production value or marketing.
User. So you got to know your audience and then in the spirit of agile and iterative, rather than trying to create a whole catalog, start with one course, one user type and, and then review it, with your customers might do some beta testing and see what they like and see what impact it has and then start building.
Dave Derington: [00:43:36] that’s Sage advice. And one thing I’d even say is that, it, even in knowing your audience there’s degrees there where I would say, okay, if I do know I’m going to be good with marketing people, and they’re going to be critical. If I have no content at all, I’m still not going to worry too much about production value at first one, or call it V 0.1 or call it beta.
Actually, I like to slap beta on so many things. Yeah. At first, because that gives you a little bit of extra added grace. It’s not that I won’t get there, the call-out to folks who’ve jumped, dumped into a customer education role, and they’re trying to do this, get the content first, then keep thinking agile, you’re going to make it awesome
Donna Weber: [00:44:19] and start showing the impact you have.
And when you can send them straight your impact on the bottom line, then your get, start getting resources to make it fancy.
Dave Derington: [00:44:27] Yeah. And that’s perfect. That’s where we want to be.
Donna Weber: [00:44:31] And so then when you start learning what everyone else is doing, then you can start to curate content. And again, back in the old days, folks, you said it had to be training and training was this and it was, but now you’ve curated, I’ve taken Coursera courses where.
part of it is to watch a video by the instructor. Then I go read this Wiki page and then I go to this website and then I read a PDF. Then I go, so again, when you have a learning management system, you can create a course of many modules. It doesn’t matter what the format is. You weave all this content together.
Does it matter who created it or where it lives? Customers don’t care. They just want to hear what they need when they need it.
Dave Derington: [00:45:12] Yeah. And dad curation is even more complicated. I had an idea more recently that we’re implementing here with this, my third team that as a part of curation, one of the things that I’ve struggled with is when you’re moving so fast, content drops everywhere.
Ideally, it’s going to be in your LMS. If you have one, sometimes you don’t. and I would also say, look, first pass curation has a couple of different flavors to it. One is. If you have your own LMS or a similar system where you can put the content and have people go through it, that is curation. You’re going to have the latest and greatest and it’s all up there.
But I would also say you should probably should maintain a library utilizing technology like Google drive box SharePoint. I don’t care what it is. And make sure. And I’ve made this mistake personally, make sure to share content and shared drives first, if somebody, an individual on your team, for example, and you have three instructional designers and one of them drops off and yeah, you might get that folder, but the idea is to have a collection and this goes outside your team.
This goes to everybody. Here is our. All the videos here, all the scraps, here’s all the assets we use to create it. It’s like your development library and then someone could come along and let’s say, Judy from the CS team is going to give a, some kind of a training at an event or something weird.
And it’s not the training team, all that stuff’s there and they could just reuse it
Donna Weber: [00:46:35] anywhere. Yeah. I’ve worked with teams where we had content management system and so everything’s there and yeah. Version control on your check things in and out. So I going away, that’s the way you can approach it as well.
Dave Derington: [00:46:47] They even used get and get hub for believe it or not. We use get hub pretty effectively for maintaining our training content. And then we used a tool called Hugo integrated with get hub. And it was really cool because our, we basically could give you any customer, a white labeled version of all of our content.
It wasn’t an LMS, but it was a really cool way to curate content and have it updated because they can make a sync script and all of their content could be white labeled put in their branding and it’s all there. It was really super neat.
Donna Weber: [00:47:19] Hey cool.
Dave Derington: [00:47:22] All right. I feel like we’re wrapping up here. We’re at the end of our time, and you’ve already talked about the cheap and cheerful, but you have any other comments on that.
And as far as your skeletal process,
Donna Weber: [00:47:32] when you are curating, so let’s say, you say, great. We’ll use this knowledge article. you might have somebody who is, that might be their title. That might be their part-time role or full-time role to have a curator. To really help connecting all these dots.
And once you create this curated content, you need to always make sure it’s up to date. So let’s say you have a course and that links out to this Wiki page, but that’s out of date or that’s no longer an active URL, then that looks bad too. So you got to make sure that all that curated content is relevant.
Dave Derington: [00:48:05] Yeah, absolutely. And that’s easy to forget if you’re moving at the speed of light. Got us. You’ve got to give yourself some time to clean up and to make sure that the content is there an updated and it’s in good, short, good shape. It’s harder than it looks and harder than we can make it on a
Donna Weber: [00:48:21] talk. Yeah.
one of my colleagues says every time you create a course, it’s like having a baby that’s forever in diapers. That needs to be changed.
Dave Derington: [00:48:33] Oh, I don’t want to go there again, but you’re right. It’s true. We have to take care of our training
Donna Weber: [00:48:39] contents. Yeah. And with in the, everyone’s an author era, people love creating that first piece of content. They really, somehow creating that first piece of content is sexy, but they updating is not sexy.
Yeah. So we need, through content, council, curators, customer education teams, really managing the content and the updates.
Dave Derington: [00:49:03] It will change your life and it will help you get a great retention and adoption and all that stuff. yeah. Okay. Let’s wrap this up. And Donna, I like to give this time to you before I close, to again, how can we find you?
How can we learn more about your company and the services that you provide?
Donna Weber: [00:49:20] Yeah. So if you go to spring board in.com or look me up on LinkedIn, I have lots of articles. I will put a few relevant blogs that I’ve written my here as well. And, I’m donna@springboardin.com. I’d love to chat.
Dave Derington: [00:49:37] Fabulous. And I highly recommend Donna. She is great to chat with. We’ve had awesome discussions including this one. And to wrap this up, once again, go check out Donna’s website, check out her blogs and articles. You can find her all over the place and speaking, et cetera this year. Yeah,
Donna Weber: [00:49:55] hopefully you’ll be there and Adam will be there.
Dave Derington: [00:49:58] Totally. I’m trying to get around to all the conferences this year. Now, if you want to learn more about us again, this is the customer education podcast, our website, if you haven’t gone there yet is. Just customer.education, all one word education, easy to find. Then you’ll find our podcasts listed out there.
Plus any show notes that we have for this one in particular, I will do my due diligence to put up links, to find Donna and see some of her great articles and content. So you can learn more there as well. And I’ll try to put those. adjacent to iTunes and others. Now, if you’ve also, please Steve found value in this podcast, share with others, share with your friends, share with your peers, share with your network.
We, as you can tell what this podcast here, we’re thankful to have Donna join us and the interview format. If you’d like to talk and share your interest and excitement and enthusiasm and passionate about customer education, we would very much like to talk with you and expose your unique thinking to our network because we’re very collaborative.
Yeah. And we all help want to help each other grow. So with that, I am Dave Derington @davederington on the Twitter. Do you have Twitter accounts?
Donna Weber: [00:51:07] I do Donna Webb at Donna Webb,
Dave Derington: [00:51:10] Donna web easy. And Adam didn’t join us today, but he’s @avramescu. If you could say it, you can spell it. Like he likes to say, hi Adam, we messed you up.
To our audience. Thanks for joining us. Go out, educate, experiment, scale your training, and find your people. Thanks everybody.
Donna Weber: [00:51:32] Thank you.