Dave Derington: [00:00:00] I have a couple more things to ask you about,
Adam Avramescu: [00:00:02] I’ll see if I have an answer
Dave Derington: [00:00:03] answer, I know you always have an answer and that’s why we do these.
Adam Avramescu: [00:00:07] We’ll see if I have an informed
Dave Derington: [00:00:13] answer.
Adam Avramescu: [00:00:14] Welcome to CELab,
the customer education laboratory, where we explore how to build customer education programs, experiment with new approaches and exterminate them it’s. And that advice that stopped growth dead in its tracks. I’m Adam Avramescu,
Dave Derington: [00:00:33] and I am Dave Derington
Adam Avramescu: [00:00:36] and we are talking to you on June. Actually a very important holiday for that heavy notes.
Let’s talk about customer education.
Dave Derington: [00:00:44] This today will be, Denny and occasionally we’re just going to pick a topic and we’re going to go off the cuff with it and shoot from the hip. Talk about what we think and, and encourage you to think as well. so what do we have to talk about today, Adam?
Adam Avramescu: [00:00:58] So today we are going to talk about sharing content and all of the risks that come with that.
Dave Derington: [00:01:06] Cool. And by sharing content, if you’re thinking what I’m thinking that is, Hey, I might have a customer who is maybe an enterprise in a really big account that says I have a, my own learning management system and my engagement and enablement system. And I want you to give me your SCORM files and videos and stuff like that.
maybe even sharing with other teams in the company,
Adam Avramescu: [00:01:26] right? Yeah. it’s, it’s going to be a pretty common ask a lot of the times as you’re working with enterprise customers that. They don’t necessarily just want to access your content through a self-serve learning center or, however, you might be delivering content to them piecemeal, but they actually want you to hand over your assets to them so they can store it in their LMS or some other way that they’re using to deliver content to their learners.
Dave Derington: [00:01:52] And I don’t know about you, but every time I get this ask and I’ve had it a number of times, I get the heebie-jeebies. If that’s a legit thing where, so I go, okay, what is it you’re trying to get from me? and the ask, I had her actually really great discussion with a customer very recently about this.
And, one of my customers said, Hey, I’ve got to ask you this. Can I get SCORM files or videos and put them in my system? And I go, let’s talk about this and why would you want to do that? And the common. I think the trend underneath that is one it’s simpler. It’s easier for a customer to have my content.
but more than that, they need to ensure that their teams, that they’re working to onboard and get to adopt your product are all checking the boxes. Everybody’s doing the training. We get a report. We know, Hey, a hundred percent of my team has gone through the training and they got a hundred percent on the test.
how do you feel about these kinds of asks Adam?
Adam Avramescu: [00:02:53] So when I think about this, I think about a few things. One is, I always want to provide customers with the best experience possible, but sometimes what the customer is asking for isn’t necessarily, what’s going to be best in the longterm. the moment that you hand over content for a customer,
Dave Derington: [00:03:12] you’re
Adam Avramescu: [00:03:13] almost inviting a question about who is now signing up to maintain that content.
And especially for. Products that change quickly. Like a lot of the software companies that many of us work in, is the customer now going to take responsibility for updating what you’ve handed over, or is the expectation set now that you’re going to continually be handing over content every time you update it on your end and for anyone who single sources content across, even formats internally, you know how challenging this is much less, doing it on the customer side.
Dave Derington: [00:03:43] Yeah. It takes a lot. I can tell you some stories. And one of them was internal where I was being asked to send some SCORM files over and there were a lot of them, and that was going to take me a good portion of the day. Plus I’ll have to build context, plus I know I’ll have to troubleshoot. And then when I do send them, my, I ended up do end up actually troubleshooting for real.
it’s not easy. And here’s my approach about this. I’m always going to ask why. And what is it that you, what problems do you want me to solve? How do we want me to help you? but then I’m always going to come up back, and this is my standard. I’m going to come back with a price deck. This is a scope of work.
This is time and materials it’s going. And if I have a customer asked me for this, I will assume that long-term we have to support it. The first thing I always talk to a customer about is okay, great. It’s not that we can’t do that, but here’s the limitations. And just ticking off on my finger is number one is content gets out of date.
Somebody has to manage it. we ha we have to troubleshoot, there’s three hot things right there, and there’s going to be a lot of time in that. And usually what I do to set the sufficient price tag on an annual basis, it could be an excess of 15, 20, $25,000. It was a lot of work and sometimes they may ask you, they being a customer, they ask you for something custom, which this is time and materials.
This is going to take, so basically, we can do that, but if you want, I actually have a skew, a code and in my, for my sales team to say, okay, we can buy that with this act will cost you this much. And this is how much it will go. That usually kills the conversation.
Adam Avramescu: [00:05:24] Yeah. A lot of the time people are asking for it because it seems abstractly like a good idea, but they’re not necessarily willing to, put their money where their mouth is.
So to speak. The other thing that you really have to consider from a contract perspective there, whether you are doing it as a skew and, they’re just buying this customization off the shelf or whether you’re doing, a statement of work around it is that there are legal implications to sharing your content.
and a lot of the time you might end up running into intellectual property issues, regarding who actually owns the content, even if you’ve already shared it with customers. it’s still your intellectual property in a lot of cases. you did the work behind it.
You figured out what the best way to train someone on your product or on your subject matter is, and even if you customize that, to. Another company’s look and feel, or maybe gave them some specifics about what their implementation might look like. you’re not necessarily saying that they now own all of the intellectual property around the content that you just gave them.
So it’s one of those things where before you just start doing this, Willy nilly, it’s really important to talk to your legal team too, about what the implications are going to be.
Dave Derington: [00:06:32] Yeah. And you also have to think about that and I’ve done this exact thing, Adam, and I thought you brought up the legal portion of it.
It takes a while to build what I would call like a, an initial contract for that. it’s like an NDA where what I did is went and this was a Gainsight and have gone elsewhere
Adam Avramescu: [00:06:48] with those. that’s a nondisclosure agreement for those of you who are now
Dave Derington: [00:06:51] non-disclosure. Yeah. there’s something similar to that.
I’ll have a contract and basically the highlights of that are. you recognize that this is our IP, but even further, one of the things in there that I’ve found in reality is, and this was spent a long time back. I don’t remember the customer, nor would I share that with you. I found some of my content floating around don’t on the internet and that is well, number one, that’s my IP.
Number two, it was out of date by a lot. and number three, because it’s out of date, people are getting the people were actually using that. And this happens for companies that. I’ve seen other companies say, Oh, I’m going to build my own training around your product. Nothing I can do to stop that.
But. if we aren’t in a partnership with our customers all around education and have an obvious conversation about that, some customers may go off and say, no, I want this. I forget you. I’m just going to build my own training and then you have other problems. so that legal agreement is really super important because it sets the stage now to prepare for that.
If you do get into this some kind of contractual obligation, you also need to make sure that you have the staff and the team to be able to support it. So basically out of the box, I would say, no, I’m I understand what you need. please use our materials. If you can’t hear us, here’s the things we have to do.
So with the legal agreement and everything, it really slows it down. A lot of people say, no, that’s not worth it.
Adam Avramescu: [00:08:11] Yeah. And I think when you’re talking, say startup to startup, this feels a little more informal, right? You’re not necessarily asking for all the long-term implications, someone’s just saying, Hey, I like that deck that you showed me.
can you send it to me? And like sometimes you have to be practical about this. if you’re just two startups sharing, training decks with one another, then you know, there’s no reason that you couldn’t, PDF it up and put a watermark on it. just to be able to share that content, but you still have to be able to set expectations that’s the version that they get.
And, if the content gets updated, you’re not automatically going to send it to them. That’s when you start doing this in a more structured way and you actually start, let’s say you have an online learning center and you have a body of content that’s going to get updated over time. And now you have enterprise customers who are asking for you to share it.
yes, you could set expectations around how often you’re going to send updated content to them and how that’s going to be tracked and what the expectations are around IP and reuse and all that good stuff. But, you also have to think about what that content. How do you package it up in a way where, you know, theoretically, you can still, you can make this easy here for the customer by continuing to host it yourself.
So a lot of online learning platforms now, and customer learning platforms, they give you the ability to, filter content by clients. So you could produce in effect, custom learning portals for each client. Some of them even offer the ability to do. Different sub domains, on your online learning center for specific customers.
And again, even if that’s something that you’re charging for, it gives you a little bit more control over the content and access to it. And a lot of customers do that, or companies do that with their learning subscriptions. So you, as the customer, get this kind of, online learning passport to the company’s content.
Yeah, and
Dave Derington: [00:10:05] that’s actually cool. I love what I’m seeing now with this trend in LMS is providing like sub-domains and, customer portals, because I can, that’s super powerful. I have a couple more things to ask you about.
Adam Avramescu: [00:10:18] so one of the
Dave Derington: [00:10:18] answer, I know you always have an answer. that’s why we do these.
Adam Avramescu: [00:10:22] We’ll see if I have an informed answer.
Dave Derington: [00:10:25] okay. So one of them I’ve been thinking about and this for any of our learning management system, friends out there, if you’re listening, this is a feature that I would personally like to see it. Yeah, we know we have integration points commonly to a CRM like Salesforce, for example, and other things.
But what I think would be really cool is to have a metal layer, some kind of a, an integration that let’s say I have a customer that’s using the same LMS that I have. How could we integrate so that they could have access to my content? And then we could share. The data, because to me I’m a very data driven customer education person.
Data is everything I want to know. Who’s gone to seen a video. What do they do? The quiz? How could I work with this data and the customer, actually those two. So either that, or allow me, provide me with tooling that allows a customer to export automatically export or just see my. My analytics, their analytics, things like that, I think would be super impactful because if we could start connecting our learning management systems and sharing from a systemic level than a lot of this ask would go away, because then while there’s an opportunity for you to sell an LMS to a client and they also have that tool they could use for their own stuff.
We think about that.
Adam Avramescu: [00:11:42] Yeah. that’s a good point. Like when a customer is asking you for you to share your content, They could be asking for several different reasons. And if the point is really around them having analytics, you do have ways of providing that to them. Now let’s say that you have all of your content being delivered in an LMS or, a customer learning portal, and that is being piped into your data warehouse through some sort of data connector, and you can visualize it and you can integrate it with your BI tool and all that good stuff.
you could. export that on a periodic basis to your customer, with the reports that they want to see. There’s no reason that you can’t do that, but, some platforms take that a step further and give you a concept of what’s called a, like a, a customer site, or someone on your customer side, it gets access to analytics within your learning portal, but they’re restricted to only see it for their user group or their users specifically.
Dave Derington: [00:12:39] Yeah. And actually, when I was at Azuqua, I set this up, I was able to introspect our system and provide a webpage that a client would basically just use their credentials log in and they could see all of their team and it was strikingly easy, frankly. I think it’s just one step away for those providers that can do that or help me automate, an email delivery of a report or something like that.
That can be in a CSV file. Something like that would be great.
Adam Avramescu: [00:13:09] Yeah. did you, do you have a second question or was that by two
Dave Derington: [00:13:12] Oh two? We’ve been talking about, so we’ve been talking about customers and another customer. And again, this is me from philosophical standpoint of customer education. We work with other teams internally to usually enablement teams, sometimes HR, learning and development, and what I’m seeing, and I’ve seen this everywhere is.
Somebody in sales enablement, for example, somebody sales enablement, for example, might say, Hey, I really want to use this content in onboarding, but we use this system internally. Can I have your stuff? And I always shot her the same way that I do because now, let’s face it customer education.
We’re building this product based training, this use case training. This is great for everybody. And internally enablement teams want this too. How do I get that to them? So I’m. Push us over the fence to you and saying, Adam, have you seen this before? Have you been asked this before? And if so, how did you address it?
Adam Avramescu: [00:14:10] Oh yeah, of course. And I’m a big believer in the fact that, internally, whether you’re, an account exec or a CSM or whoever you are, you should know what customers know about the product. And I’m a big advocate of encouraging, internal folks to take customer training as if that they, as if they were customers.
Now, I don’t think that necessarily needs to involve a content handoff. if you can give your sales enablement, people access to your LMS data, which often is a little bit easier because they also work at your company. then you can have internal people. We’ll take the customer training in the customer LMS.
They’re just an internal user from your company in the customer facing LMS. If that makes sense. so it, it gives out a little bit more empathy for the experience that the customer is going to have going through this content. And you don’t have to worry as much the IP side of it, because again, it’s still your company.
but you do have to think about, if you are going to hand off the content instead of having, internal folks take it in your customer LMS. again, how are we going to do the handoff around keeping the content update? What expectations are we going to set with each other? Are we going to have an SLA for, every time we update the customer piece, we’re also going to export it to you for the internal piece.
A lot of the time, it just ends up being way more straightforward to have internal people go to the customer. LMS.
Dave Derington: [00:15:28] I agree. And that’s my strategy pretty much 99 times out of a hundred, although I’ve been challenged on that lately. And that’s why I’m asking you that I’ve worked at. A couple of different places, several different places that have their own internally facing, LMS.
And they go, I’ve got to put it here because it’s the same aspect I have from customers. I need to track this information. And I understand that, but my first inclination is to say, why can’t I make you give you access to our customer facing system? And then you can bring all the data and analytics and just use that.
Or again, I used to work at a , but there’s tools like Workato and Zapier and stuff where you can. Automatically bring that data back in or even better use the data warehouse internally. So all that data is accessible by everybody. And that’s really the bottom line. You can still have your internal, like a sales enablement platform or a customer success enablement platform.
but it’s different from your onboarding or from my customer education platform. It doesn’t have to be, but I get really passionate about this because I feel like. and again, I’m speaking to all of you in our, in the field out there. I feel like we, as customer education, people are a fountain had the source of the river for a lot of content that’s being asked of and enabling programs internally, or HR teams internally have a different lens of that, but they all tend to want our content from the product basis.
Like how do we use this tool? And then they accentuate that or embellish upon that with other things. For example, if I’m in customer success, enablement. okay. Product aside, what are the other things are teaching? That’s not us, right? That’s not our job per se. but that’s just my take
Adam Avramescu: [00:17:06] on it. It will.
and you couldn’t, you can architect this from a content standpoint, too, right? If their assignment in the sales enablement LMS is to go. Watch, or complete a learning path in the customer LMS, then come back and answer some questions about it. then they still have access to basically to the same data that they were looking for in the first place, in a lot of cases.
So part of it again is asking them, what data they’re really looking for. And when you start talking about putting it in, a data warehouse, which is a different option or building some sort of data integration, it’s certainly possible. but I think it also just becomes a bit of a negotiation, whether you’re handing off content or whether they’re, but they’re building content around your content or whether it’s all going into a data warehouse, someone is doing extra work to make that happen.
And not everyone has the time or the prioritization to be able to make that work happen. Honestly, that’s part of the conversation I think to have upfront is, we obviously both want this content. We both want this to happen. We both see the value in having, whichever team you’re working with enabled on these same things.
But when we think about the amount of work that it’s going to take and the amount of effort, and the amount of coordination, both to set it up and ongoing, let’s really have a discussion about what the best solution. Maybe short, medium and long-term is.
Dave Derington: [00:18:21] Yeah. And because you’re a turtle, you can have those conversations and hopefully they’re good ones.
Adam Avramescu: [00:18:26] Yeah. if you have good partners cross-functionally which, I hope that any customer education leader does then yeah. You should be in a good position to have those conversations. And usually, I’ve been in a position where. We’re were always good friends with other enablement teams.
Like we’re not totally oppositional with them. we’re truly collaborators because a lot of the time when you’re talking to sales enablement or internal L&D or other learning people at the company, you can become friends just by dint of speaking the same language, because we all spend so much time in our businesses talking to others who don’t come from a learning background.
So a lot of the time it’s a good to have that community. Anyway,
Dave Derington: [00:19:04] four we’re finding the others were all customer educators, right? Yeah. we’re our own customers.
Adam Avramescu: [00:19:09] Indeed. All right. let’s wrap this mini episode up, Dave. All
Dave Derington: [00:19:14] right. the, in the spirit of keeping it short, we’ve given you a few things to talk about sharing with others, sharing with other teams, customers, they’re going to ask you, they’re going to ask for this or our advices, put some Gates up and basically it’s expectation setting the conversation you should have with any customer is.
Why are you asking for that? Which is usually going to be, Hey, this is for reporting and making sure my team is accepting it and commonly what I do, what we do, set a, set, a high bar, make, put a price tag on it. And if somebody really wants it, give it to them, but make sure that you’re prepared to support it.
but try to steer your customers towards using if you have LMS with a portal that they can access data or have make it a basic agreement to give them reports. So I think. Yeah. w we beat that out, consider the legal applications or legal implications as well. and Adam,
Adam Avramescu: [00:20:05] and I guess the one other point is, sharing internally, you obviously have a little bit more access to the people that you’re working with.
And again, being able to talk that out and talk about the, your short, medium and longterm plan and how much effort it’s going to take from either of your teams, as well as from business systems or whoever would be integrating data. you got to know how to work together on that. And if you can align on what makes sense now and what makes sense in the future, then you’ll be heading in the right direction.
Dave Derington: [00:20:31] Absolutely. So it sounds good. No, this was great for a nice mini episode. So if you want to learn more, yeah. Now, if you want to learn more, we have a podcast website at customer got education. Make it really easy there, you can find our show notes and other material. And please, if you found this valuable, I know that I’ve gotten some feedback from listeners.
Who’ve said, Hey, I’m sharing this with all my team at a naked requirement for them to listen. that is awesome. We are humbled by that. Thank you so much, please just share with others. If customer success teams that really need this director of customer success leadership. I know Adam, we feel that some stuff that said, Hey, my CEO is listening to the podcast now, and that blew me away.
Adam Avramescu: [00:21:13] if you’re a CEO listening to this podcast, I hope you will take a bit of time out of your day to give us a five-star review as well.
Dave Derington: [00:21:18] Absolutely. All right. And as usual, on Twitter, Oh @davederington
Adam Avramescu: [00:21:25] and I’m at Mesquite and to our audience. Thanks for joining us. Go out, educate experiment, and find your peace.
Dave Derington: [00:21:35] Thanks everybody.