Sandi Lin: [00:00:00] Prime customers were very valuable and did prime caused them to be valuable or it was a correlation or causation. We don’t care.

Dave Derington: [00:00:17] Welcome to CELab the customer education laboratory, where we explore how to build customer education programs, experiment with new approaches and exterminate them this and bad advice that stopped broke. Deadness tracks. I am Dave Derington and today we have a very special guest Sandy Lynn’s CEO and co-founder of Skilljar.

Welcome 

Sandi Lin: [00:00:38] Sandy. Hello, and thanks so much for having me on the show. 

Dave Derington: [00:00:42] It’s going to be fun. Thank you so much for joining us. And before we start, we have a tradition that CELab, where we always like to say what national day of is today. Any guesses? there’s two. 

Sandi Lin: [00:00:57] I hope it’s national cat day. 

Dave Derington: [00:00:59] It’s nothing national cat day.

It’s national maple syrup day. 

Sandi Lin: [00:01:04] I like maple syrup 

Dave Derington: [00:01:06] pancakes, and it’s also an, right brothers day, which I’ve never heard of it. That’s interesting. So with that, let’s get going. Sandy, what I like to do first is just, Let me start again. Okay. All right. with this episode, we’re going to do something very different from our normal and previous episodes.

So we’re going off channel here. we’re talking to C-level and we’re really getting into your head. We want to learn about your, take on the industry and talk about how, in this case you have a learning management tool. That’s when the best of breeds that we have out there, our listeners. Pretty much on this channel, all know of skull jar, and we all love Skilljar.

it is, as you say, in your website, which is a leading customer training platform for enterprises to accelerate product adoption. And increased customer retention. So let’s go ahead and get started. I will lead in with the questions. So Sandy, before we start getting down the rabbit hole and get into some really good juicy questions, we really want to hear about your journey.

So a couple of questions here. Tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got here now you’re the CEO of an amazing company and then tell us like how the vision, how the product came to be. 

Sandi Lin: [00:02:19] So I think like most customer education professionals, my. Career makes no sense to how I got here today. 

Dave Derington: [00:02:27] So 

Sandi Lin: [00:02:29] let’s see I’ll work backwards.

So I’ve been at it, building Skilljar for, seven ish, years. 

Dave Derington: [00:02:36] It’s amazing. 

Sandi Lin: [00:02:37] and we took a few pivots early on, which we’ll talk about later. before this, I was leading product management teams at Amazon where I did both B2B B to C physical items. Digital items are really got a good breadth of experience there across different business models.

before that I got my MBA from Stanford and my undergrad is actually in civil engineering. Which is funny because a lot of our very early customers at Skilljar were somehow related to civil engineering and construction. So it all comes full circle. 

Dave Derington: [00:03:12] I have a science background, a STEM background as well.

And it’s funny how I, maybe that’s kind of part and parcel of those of us. Who’ve been down that. That line of education, where they’re really teaching you to also teach others, especially when you get up to go, you’ve gone through the MBA program. So now masters level and above you’re able to teach 

Sandi Lin: [00:03:32] one would think, I sometimes have a question internally, are you a teacher or are you a learner?

And I actually think for myself personally, I’m very much a learner. I don’t think I would have the. Patience and, skill to teach a classroom, which gives me so much admiration for all the teachers of the world and all of our customers who are really teaching, about products and services out there.

Dave Derington: [00:03:55] it’s a challenging job to say the list least, but your product definitely helps. And, let’s go for one last question here. I’m really personally curious. I’m always loved the origin stories. it’s like a superhero thing. What was that spark? That was the moment that you said let’s do this thing.

you said it was a, you had some course corrections and such, what was it that really made? You want to go down this, into this field? 

Sandi Lin: [00:04:24] Gosh, I’m going to burst your bubble and every, everyone listening as to the true origin of skill . I think it takes a certain, how do you say this word?

Naivete naiveness to be an entrepreneur and when Jason Stewart, my co-founder and I left Amazon, we had no idea what we were getting into in terms of starting a company. But one of the things that we were really passionate about was using technology to connect people and to break down. The barriers between, people who needed knowledge and the people who had it, because in today’s day and age, you can learn so much if you just have access to the right material and resources.

And so we first started with a consumer learning site, really a Yelp for lifelong learning, great product, a terrible business for us. We, Quickly pivoted into a small business version of what Skillshare does today. And so it was a video based commerce based learning platform for celebrity book authors and fitness instructors, and the $99 a month revenue model and up business was going okay.

But it wasn’t going to scale to what we wanted our impact to be. And. Pretty much in 2015 or so we just started getting a lot of inbound interest from companies that are just amazing, brands, fortune five hundreds, many of whom are so our customers today and, we were five people in Seattle, no funding.

We had this video based learning platform with the gray. Yeah. Student user experience. And even then I could not have told you what the terms LMS or customer success were. All we knew after, as the months went by as all these amazing companies were adopting Skilljar for their customers and partners and, coming to us with requests, gosh, there’s no other learning platform that works on Chrome or has API APIs or has self-registration or has this.

Deep linking thing. And I was like, what is deep linking for so long? And then, Oh, you mean like a hyperlink, like a URL for a training course. So you could send it to your user base. And all of these things were game-changing for companies that were in a ton of pain from trying to adapt HR systems usually, or sending in-person instructors out and unable to scale that.

so really, one of our values here at Skilljars, customer focus, because. This company only exists because of our customer feedback, those early customer advocates who, really took a chance on us and continue to help us develop the platform into what it is today and what we hope it will be in the future.

Dave Derington: [00:07:06] Awesome. Okay. That firms up really well. That’s exciting. And it’s really exciting to see that you have had this journey, not just personally, but as a company, do this, try this. It’s an iterative approach and. And that’s interesting because in this space, I remember having discussions with a bunch of people about how many.

Similar, I wouldn’t say similar to how many products were out there for learning, but it’s a hard ocean to navigate when there’s all these obstacles and things and your product is one of them that I think is very clear, right. As a clear message and a clear use. And it’s easy. So with that’s a great intro.

let’s start off with some meaty questions. Not that the last one. Wasn’t what I’m really interested first is talking about the state. Of customer education, that’s not Washington and the New Jersey, it’s sorry, bad joke. I’m a dad. here’s two questions to unwrap in this. again, this is your personal view and your company view of where do you think things are today with this field that we call customer education?

Again, this is new or at least I think so. And then unpacking that a little bit more. What are those first trends? What are the trends that you’re seeing? Because here you are working with a whole pool of customers now, and of course they’re informing you on a lot of stuff, so we’ll start there.

Sandi Lin: [00:08:29] Yeah. It is very cool to be in customer education and customer success. I would say when I first heard that term three or four years ago, I was like, You’ve gotta be kidding me. this is a new thing that people are excited about. This is so brain dead obvious, because remember I came from the Amazon world.

So largely consumer-based where customer obsession was, front and center in every single discussion. And so it was like, okay, in the B2B world and software. We have to have a whole movement that customers are important. Like I do not understand this at all. And fast forward three or four years later, and I get it, I get the industry much more than before.

so I think customer education is really becoming very important because of the rise of the customer. And I’m sure it’s obvious to everybody listening to this podcast, but it is not a visceral emotional. Concept that’s in the heart of most B2B companies. And, for so long companies have gotten really good about sales and marketing, and then they provide the product and they walk away and wait for the support tickets to come in.

So this idea of actually enabling and educating your customers right. Is a new muscle that a lot of software companies just haven’t flexed. And the reality is products are getting more complex and they’re. Iterating and innovating faster and faster, but the human brain only has so much capacity to adapt and figure things out on its own, especially at scale.

So at the same time, retaining customers in this customer success and subscription model was more important than ever before, and actually training your customers and how to not just push button a and push button B, but actually how to get value from that product and their business context is.

More important than ever before. And I always think it’s a no brainer, but it’s not necessarily in the grand scheme of the world. So it 

Dave Derington: [00:10:29] is it’s. so just playing on that, I just had the experience recently where I have a product that I’m trying to use and, a manager or a team, and it was a heavy data product.

I’m not going to. Name names or anything here, but I’m that person that now I’m a customer. I’m trying to figure this thing out and I’m trying to figure it out really fast. And my retention, my use of this product is really dependent on that first experience and a terrible first experience. And this isn’t any product that you would know off the top of your head, but I go, where is the education where we’re going to go?

Like even documentation doesn’t necessarily help documentation is technical docs, right? So that’s the kind of stuff that I’m really interested in hearing more from your perspective. Like we all think this is new. It’s not really new. you were talking about like extended enterprise type learning, the old school stuff.

And now we say this is new because what you just said, Hey, we’re moving, we’re iterating. We’re moving at lightning speed. And that’s a real frustration for our customer who just wants something. 

Sandi Lin: [00:11:27] Yeah. The one I think about sometimes is, Zappos. Zappos, the shoe seller that Amazon acquired while I was there.

So buying shoes is not new, everybody. Has bought shoes for centuries, but WhatsApp was, did was put it online when there was a lot of value that consumers got from that. And so I think similarly, customer education is super old. Like the idea of training your users, has been around for a long time in the services model.

back with on-premise software vendors would go on site and install. On the customer’s server configure and then train everyone and deploy and then leave. And then of course, because we’re still, decades ago, those users probably would stay at that company for 40 years and then retire the pension.

That’s not the world we live in anymore. got a year, maybe two, sorry, deployed in the cloud. doesn’t mean that users can adopt self-service just because you can deploy it self service. And I think tech companies have almost gone the complete opposite direction of just because I can deploy in the cloud.

They’ve completely skipped that onboarding step. and then also, I don’t know if you remember Chrissy Irvine at Skilljar connect said, with three-year contracts, it’s often the case where a hundred percent of your initial users may have changed roles or change jobs by the end of the contract.

And Customer education is really an ongoing journey throughout an entire cycle. And you touched on something too, of what is customer education and what is learning? Is it documentation? Is it long form training? Is it YouTube videos? And I think that is one of the other trends that. People in the industry are grappling with, 

Dave Derington: [00:13:01] how Like what is it like, I know what I’m thinking, but I’m curious how you frame that up. 

Sandi Lin: [00:13:06] I first started going to learning conferences and the very beginning of his company, like six or seven years ago, and this may still be in the case in the mainstream, but a lot of traditional. Instructional design people don’t consider video to be learning because it’s not interactive.

It’s not, it doesn’t follow all the principles that interactive content should, but I always come back to, if you look at social media, if typing 140 characters on Twitter is now considered social, then I certainly count many forms of content consumption under the umbrella of customer education and enablement.

And we’re humans. We learn in different ways. Multi-med multiple modes, multiple channels, all day seminars, YouTube videos, marketing books, videos, community in that messages. And I view customer education personally is tying all of these into a holistic experience. and I, but I do think in the mainstream of the industry, sometimes people still turn up their noses at things as basic as video.

So I think having a healthy discussion around what is. Learning and really not what the academic sense of learning is, but what is your customer consider learning is the right one to have 

Dave Derington: [00:14:18] no, I just don’t play on that. I agree with you a and I’ve gone to some of those conferences and I’ve talked to people, actually, I’m starting to see a shift, but one of the challenges that I’ve had at least with hiring has been, Hey, I get an instructional designer.

I need an instructional designer. And a lot of them that come from a traditional educated background as an instructional designer. I agree. He’ll look at a video, scarf to video like what’s that has to do with training and education. It’s a fast delivery mechanism. And one of the things that I think is super valuable for us is that yes, I can go heavy and use SCORM, or I can use a game of vacation and I can do all these different things.

You know what, when I start out, the first thing I want to do is get something in front of a customer in the document. Doesn’t cut it. A video is great. It’s concise. It can be put everywhere. It’s multimodal. It’s fun. You should be. by I like what you’re saying, that you’re S you’re talking about broadening that definition of what learning.

Constitutes, 

Sandi Lin: [00:15:14] I can guarantee you that if you look at the rise of marketing, not everybody in marketing has a formal degree in writing. There’s many ways to produce content that is consumable and valued by your customer. Yeah. And this is not most tech companies are not, teaching their customers or they’re not struggling with teaching their customers in a formal multi-day multi-week curriculum in traditional instructional design.

Hey, I went to school for civil engineering and you do not want me building any bridges. 

Dave Derington: [00:15:48] I was a chemist it’s same. that’s a little dangerous in my world, too. your bridge is going to. Go well, hopefully I won’t fall down, but I could blow stuff up. That’s not cool. Yeah. 

Sandi Lin: [00:15:56] But you do touch on an interesting point because we have noticed in our customer base that many of the sort of directors and above executives, many of them do not have, education backgrounds, and they come from the business.

So I do think there is this trend or, internal struggle in the industry about how do we evolve the discipline from. Largely a sort of teacher and content practice into a real business function. And that means thinking about questions like, what is the revenue attributable to the function, whether that’s director and direct, the packaging into services offers and driving consumption of the content and not just putting it out.

And if you build it, they will not come or won’t necessarily come. And 

Dave Derington: [00:16:39] we hear all the time. 

Sandi Lin: [00:16:40] Yeah. And being able to justify and show the value of the, of the function through business return, just the way, I don’t question our marketing or sales team. When, they’re putting out an ebook or are trying a new campaign, it’s just considered something that you do.

And customer education is still in some environments, trying to figure out how to have that conversation. 

Dave Derington: [00:17:03] Totally. so what are their trends? So this is really good that taps into what’s the ROI of what we’re doing. How do you measure things? and you can help those business, business-minded individuals to really understand this is the outcome of our education.

How do we map that in and show? Not necessarily causation, but correlation. so what other, I think you have a couple other trends 

Sandi Lin: [00:17:20] that can I riff on that causation correlation thing? So a lot things that, I think similar to you and Adam, I poo-pooed the entire conversation because for example, one of the things at Amazon we knew was that.

Prime customers were very valuable and did prime caused them to be available valuable or was a correlation or causation? We don’t care. It’s a good thing. Get more prime customers. over time, we were able to refine that analysis a little bit, but Hey, to have customers, users engaged with learning, how to use your product better, I take that all day long.

Okay, but other trends. So one thing and keep in mind that at Skilljar, most of our customers are super cutting edge. And then, I would say we also have early adopters that are not necessarily the cutting edge. And then we have the, the base of the market, the crossing, the chasm, which we’re probably not there yet as an industry.

So I would say maybe not in our, most passionate, activated customer base, but more in the, Center of the market. There is I think a tension between learning as a centralized function versus it being fragmented between HR sometimes sales and then customer education. And we’ll see the same company go through, Oh, everybody needs a centralized system.

Oh no, that won’t work anymore. And then let’s go back to a centralized system because some of our customers have been with us for five years. And I just find that tension. Very fascinating because, 

Dave Derington: [00:18:55] why do you think that’s there though? you’re talking about, 

Sandi Lin: [00:18:57] I think it’s a branding issue because this category is called learning management systems.

Which, at Sculptra we struggle whether to call ourselves in LMS, but guess what? Every single person in the company is trying to learn something. So as opposed to say, let’s take CRM versus ATS, that’s customer relationship management, like a Salesforce, which is typically for sales contacts, and ATS stands for applicant tracking system, which is a, used on the recruiting side.

So nobody, these days thinks anymore that recruiters should be using Salesforce to track. Applicants, but guess what? Their contact records with data attributes that you move through a funnel, it’s the same thing. And I’m sure at some point there is a question about, why can’t we just use the CRM for this?

Because it’s very similar or now there’s a whole category of recruiting marketing software where you nurture your candidate pool, drip campaigns, all of it. And maybe they struggle with the same thing. So I think LMS has a. Big branding problem. First in terms of the visceral negative reaction, most people feel when they hear the term LMS and then also the industry has branded itself into a function, which is everywhere.

And so of course like your it or procurement, person’s going to say, Hey, the employees are learning. The customers are learning. The sales team is learning. Our partners are learning. Why can’t we just use a single learning system? I think that’s something that is still, It’s a debate that happens a lot in the industry, I think.

And we see even the same company go through several cycles. 

Dave Derington: [00:20:33] Oh my God. I’ve seen just a personal story. I’ve seen it. Two companies now we’ve had the same problem. So back when I was at Gainsight, I think at one point we had four different LMS. Tools and they each serve different functions. Some aren’t used at all, and at an outreach, we’re going through that as well, where we’re, actually, you would really like this.

It turns out other, our internal teams are really glommed on and adopted Skilljar as well. And they’re super excited about it and they liked the tool it’s easy to use and Hey, let’s just use this. And everybody was on the same ship, which actually creates synergies because now there’s other material that we can surface.

Internal, let’s say we have an internal person that’s onboarding, Hey, you can log into the same system. You get access because you’re in this group to the internal self at hand, our product training, which why not, an HR can use that as well if they choose to do So it’s interesting.

It’s an interesting journey. 

Sandi Lin: [00:21:25] Another example might be, customer knowledge basis and internal wikis. Again, I don’t hear a lot of companies saying that should be the same system.

Dave Derington: [00:21:38] But 

Sandi Lin: [00:21:38] partly it’s because in customer education, we’re still having the correlation causation debate, which when we get to the point where that’s not a debate, then I think the industry’s in a good place. And weirdly as having a discussion with one of our customer executives the other day, and they’re investing heavily in customer training, through Skillshare as well as their community.

And so I asked him. How do you think about the return for those two types of products? And he goes, it’s really weird, but for community, I just put that into the bucket of I just have to have that, and I’m not trying to like, quantify the return on community, but for some reason, customer training, I put into the bucket of Oh, I need to justify this somehow.

And he didn’t really have. A rational reason for why, but I think this is something that will continue to evolve in the industry and it’s going to take, great success stories and the rise of the chief customer officer and the importance of, customer retention and product adoption for that to continue.

can I add one more trend? 

Dave Derington: [00:22:37] Yeah, do it, please do. 

Sandi Lin: [00:22:39] I guess again, coming from the Amazon world, I have been shocked at how little DNA there is in the learning industry around user experience and that’s everything from number of clicks and usage of the content to just pure technical performance of particular.

We score them, I would say so. And if you think about it historically for HR, which is how most LMS has came to be the primary business driver was compliance and your end user was forced to take training. And the, it doesn’t matter if it takes 10 seconds to load the file or that requires internet Explorer, popups, or that it takes, 10 clicks to get anywhere, or it doesn’t work on mobile.

Your user’s captive. So a lot of the dialogue in the industry then became, how do I make this shiny little animated character? Or track things with a super antiquated standard that nobody else on the web uses anymore because it’s 40 years old and it doesn’t work in mobile devices. So I think there’s a lot of underemphasis of just pure web analytics and user experience things.

And, I know at Amazon, we used to say, every click, you lose 30% of your engagement. And like I, 

Dave Derington: [00:23:59] a big it’s huge I spent and no Adam has done this as well. My cohost that we. We have come from marketing backgrounds as well. My last role at  was the, the director of, user enablement users across all functionalities.

And I was in marketing and it was such a refreshing place to be. Because here I am poor Dave, living in the education world, but I’m embedded in marketing. And like you’re talking about, and your experience at Amazon, you’re looking at numbers, you’re looking at people, you’re looking at kind of marketing metrics and what’s driving people through the experience.

And, I was on the trajectory too. Yeah, it’s skilled. You are there before we got acquired, which is a good thing. But to build up to that, I was looking at web analytics. how many people are going to pages. I was looking at what, who was going to my videos, but it’s all kind of a numbers game.

And it takes a lot of the marketing plays to really start to measure. Okay. I need to go take this class. How many clicks does it take? If somebody goes to traditional HR and trust me, I’ve just done this. I’ve done this for several different things and many different companies. It’s infuriating, 

Sandi Lin: [00:25:04] the admin.

Sometimes you have to load your customer into your HR system and then invite them manually. That’s really awesome. You don’t have security. People love it when you do that too. 

Dave Derington: [00:25:15] it’s crazy. But then now we’re seeing people adopt systems like Skilljar, where it’s a lot more fluid, open, engaging, easy to use.

Now you can still get to those compliance metrics. And like I say, one of this is one of those big factors that are difference between different between traditional forms of education that are commonly been sourced from HR or learning and development function. Do you know what customer education is defined as we’re moving a lot faster, we’re in a fast and Quickly evolving environment and our customers, particularly like my customers let’s talk outreach.

I work with sales people. how much time do they want to invest watching a course and funneling around, fiddling around with all the little cliques and stuff when they’re losing money. Their money is money in their pocket that they have to take my class. So those are the kinds of things that we’re really starting to get into in this industry and pivoting.

And that’s a really great trend. 

Sandi Lin: [00:26:05] Yeah. And I would say also, some of our earliest customers like bleeding edge customers, they actually came to us because of technical performance. I think this is not something which is really talked about in the industry, but most learning platforms.

If they’re in the cloud, there’s still, what’s called single-tenant, which means it’s essentially just, a hosted server somewhere that’s highly customized to one particular customer. But our earlier customers were like, Hey, it needs to perform, we might have. 500 people a day. You might have 5,000 people a day with we do, an email blast and being able to scale up and down, like we were built on Amazon web services from a star multi-tenant, which means, it’s theoretically infinitely, scalable.

don’t tell Jason. I said, we worked a lot too very fast global content delivery. as context, like people are shocked that. We, on average receive like one and a half support tickets per month per customer here. 

Dave Derington: [00:27:03] Oh goodness. that’s exceptional. Usually it’s like 10, five feet and five and like 20 for a lot of standard software.

Sandi Lin: [00:27:11] Some of our, customers actually had support teams that they had to fund just to deal with training tickets before moving to Skilljar, because things wouldn’t update appropriately or the site would be down and. Breaking changes would be made. And so some of the things that I think in every other function in the enterprise people take for granted in software haven’t happened in the learning market yet, 

Dave Derington: [00:27:37] but we’re getting there, you’re blazing the trails.

Sandi Lin: [00:27:40] And I would say also historically since. Learning systems are geared towards HR. There’s a disincentive to innovate because change means risk and HR does not like risk. 

Dave Derington: [00:27:52] No, that’s for darn sure. but I would say that those, awareness training videos that I’ve had to look through and I’ve seen all the Chrome and all that stuff would have been so much more concise in a 15 minute video through Skilljar, but that’s just me.

Okay. that’s trends, so let’s do something. Let’s do something else. Let’s talk. Now a little bit more about Skilljar and you, and in particular your customers. so what I’m. I think you have an amazing product, I’ve had the good fortune to be able to use it. Thank goodness.

I didn’t as equal, but now we have it at outreach. Adam’s used it before. let’s talk about the folks. So we just came off of school jar CanAct and if for those of you who listen to our pockets, we’re having lists of our podcasts. We have. An episode on connect, which was really great.

We’d break that down. that’s an event by the way, you should attend. I’m sure Sandy is going to be even better next year. It was amazing this year. so here’s the question for you about your customers? what’s going on in your customer base? for example, what are the interesting things that your folks are doing or questions that in hypothesis, like we need to, we’d like to drive down a hypothesis and CELab.

What kind of things are your people they’re using the product exploring? 

Sandi Lin: [00:29:03] This is so fun. connect for me was really fun this year, too, because we had a lot of customers from different industries Latham. Our first year, I felt like it was very tech heavy and it’s still tech heavy, but we had a lot more representation this time from nonprofits and hardware and services and bricks and mortar.

and we also have different customers. At different points along the maturity curve. So even customers at forward-thinking companies, it’s their first customer ed program and customers that are five years in and I’ve gone through every single business model. So that was so cool to see everybody in the same room.

So I would say some interesting things. One is the customer education spread outside of tech and, we. Probably two thirds of our customers are in software and tech, but we have so many now that are in pharmaceuticals or hardware or consumer bricks and mortar. And sometimes, actually what you and I would consider these old school industries are way more invested in training than tech.

We just brought on a great customer. It’s a, and you’re like, why would anybody we need training for doors it’s for their installers that, had to be holding onto. Calling support and waiting on hold for two hours, which is not, what a darn Stover wants to be doing. And some of these old school industries, you don’t have a myth about self-service and they don’t have a mode where they have to hyper-focus on justifying every last dollar of ROI.

They’re like, Hey, my customer is on hold for two hours. We need to fix that. And so I’m definitely seeing a lot of. Customer education, coming online, that’s not intact, which is exciting. 

Dave Derington: [00:30:42] That’s interesting too, because it’s not just called the flection it’s customer experience. Two hours on hold.

I’m not doing that. I just want to look at a video on YouTube, but it would be so much better if I’m a customer. I’m part of a company and all of that stuff is right there in containerd in a system 

Sandi Lin: [00:31:00] where a company’s also, often they don’t have relationship with their end user, so they might sell to, an institution of some kind like, yeah.

And that institution might buy a thousand units of something. And so the vendors like, Hey, I don’t actually have a relationship with the users of my product. And they see education as part of a big DT, digital transformation of how do we actually engage with our end users in a way, that builds relationship for the longterm.

So another cool thing I’m seeing is customer education across the entire life cycle. So the. The predominant use case in tech is onboarding. And I would say account onboarding. So probably the first 90 days that a customer’s live with the product, but we are seeing more and more pre-sales. So industry enablement, academic use cases where.

Companies are even starting to launch licenses with training programs to universities. and then post-sale so advanced topics, continuous user onboarding when there are new users of a product after the initial implementation and advanced topics. So that’s been really cool to see. I especially love the pre-sales programs.

Cause I think customer education is the ultimate form of marketing, actually delivering true value to potential users of your product. And also, that’s an awesome way for prospects to get an experience of what the actual product and the customer success experience is like, 

Dave Derington: [00:32:30] I have to tell a story based on exactly this and.

So when you just say, okay, Hey, we could use education for pre-sales and it’s the best tool ever to quantify that at Gainsight, we were asking all these questions and the good fortune that we have with Gainsight is a, it’s a really day to have a product. And it has all your telemetry about what your product is being used for by your customers.

So what we had done is we integrated our learning data into Gainsight and match that up. One-to-one with. the product data, and then we can answer a questions about, for example, okay. I, this is the weirdest thing Sandy ever. I saw so many people who were not customers coming through our training curriculum.

It was wide open. Anybody could register and. I was like, who are these people? So I started looking and saying, okay, I don’t care about the outliers who have, they’re not related, they’re not doing anything with product. They have not done anything with product over time. Let’s look at a section of time where these people are coming in.

They’re not directly mapped to an account, but then they become directly mapped to an account. So they’re coming, converting from a presale to a sale. And then I correlated how much training did they do and did that. Effect a bump and yes, you could see it. And it was a lag. It was a leading indicator.

Like I would see here if I’m trying to show on a whiteboard here at time as January and January, I see some people coming through the system. if I would go back and I can look at the opportunity, log in Salesforce, for example, I could correlate them. Oh, they’re opportunities or prospects three months out.

I see another depth and I see a closed one, 

Sandi Lin: [00:34:12] right? One customer that shall remain nameless told us that education was their highest converting marketing offer higher than trial demo request. Any of it, 

Dave Derington: [00:34:22] we need to elevate that. 

Sandi Lin: [00:34:23] Yeah. Also because right. Marketers tend to pay something like $200 per email address.

So in terms of justifying ROI, if you can figure out how to tap into the marketing budget, that’s a win for the whole, for everybody, for the company and for the customer education function, we see a lot. With this use case also in open source or kind of developer driven technologies, because they’re often so new and so cutting edge, that there’s no way for people to learn that without going to the source of whoever’s in charge of that particular, new technology and also developers actually really liked to learn online.

they don’t really as much prefer to go to in-person trainings. So that’s been a good match as well. When we see, industry enablement, education on a pre-sales perspective. what else? we’re starting to see more justification on the cost side. Now I have always thought this was a huge opportunity and I can tell you, 99.9, 9% of skilled our customers come to us with product adoption, improving product adoption, improving customer retention, customer experience, story, but pretty much 90 to 180 days and to implementation, they’re like, wow, I don’t have to travel as much. Wow. Our support tickets are going down. Oh, wow. We’ve been able to save our internal headcount scaling needs by 20 to 30%. And so we’re starting to see a little bit more of that. Dialogue, both in our sales conversations, as well as our customer conversations, because people realize just how much of a cost savings it is to actually proactively train your customers as opposed to waiting for them to, come to you with a problem.

Yeah. let’s see. Another hot topic. I think certifications as well as virtual labs are both pretty hot right now. I feel like connect. Might’ve been part of a certifications, frenzy 

Dave Derington: [00:36:08] going on, where we were talking about, and we’re going, we’re in the thick of certifications right now with looking at vendors and trying to figure out who integrates with Skilljar.

but it’s, that’s a hot topic in patrol labs similarly. So because, labs are. For S for a lot of products, very difficult to implement and costly. And you want a customer, for example, again, going back to my time at Gainsight, we built a training environment. And what I loved about what Salesforce could do is they have this environment hub where I could easily, and we automated this.

Sandy, if you were to register for Gainsight, Training, what you would get is an automated email that would send you a link and a log into a development org with Gainsight layered on top of it, with a training for harness of all the exercises that are in the training program. And then you were like, what I’ve got.

Oh, and you’re starting to do. And like the story I told you with the, the people that were coming in as a pre-sales activity, there was one person. I had a conversation with. Who was nowhere near. Like they weren’t a customer success manager. They know anything about Gainsight. They said, I called them and I said, Hey, can I talk to you?

Yeah. why are you getting this sort vacation in Gainsight? They said, I want to get a job in it. And I’m a student right now. When I graduated, I wanted to go work for such and such a company. And I’m like, Oh my dear, goodness. That’s amazing. And people do that. Yeah. Reach out. And they’re proactive.

And they use that for career trajectory work. So important. 

Sandi Lin: [00:37:37] It’s a 

Dave Derington: [00:37:37] different flavor of certification that you don’t often see. 

Sandi Lin: [00:37:40] We’ve also had, customers be able to start their own businesses because of what they’ve been able to learn through, through online training. So we have one of our very early customers, was only in-person before using Skilljar and we power still their online video Academy.

And it’s like a. CAD hardware, software type of company, and it’s targeted at the jewelry industry. And we know in that case, there’s some people that were able to take that and watch their own businesses making custom jewelry, which I thought was really cool. That’s 

Dave Derington: [00:38:12] super cool. And like an Etsy and things like that.

There’s a huge market for that kind of custom made jewelry and, in a boutique home type, workshop. that’s super cool. let’s see. let’s pivot here and I think we’ve done a lot. You’ve given us a lot of good stuff on what your customers are doing, and that’s, I’m really interested because you have a, such a diversity of the kind of customers you have, which is novel for an LMS.

Sandi Lin: [00:38:39] Yeah. It’s an interesting it’s and you can’t predict from the outside sometimes when a company’s like on the inside, you might be. What we would consider a super old school company. That’s really progressive on training and the way to think about it and the reverse, you might have some really like brand name tech companies.

And, from a training perspective, they’re very old school. So you just never know everything’s fresh. 

Dave Derington: [00:39:03] let’s pivot here. Let’s talk. The last subject that I’d like to ask you about is really talking. At your level, do someone else at your level, a CEO of a company? of course there’s a spectrum, a rainbow of different kinds of CEOs from a small startup all the way up to a massive organization, but.

Sandy, when you’re talking with other C levels or even board members for that fact, what do they talk? What are you talking with them about, with regards to customer education and this whole field, and obviously they’re supporting you and you’re going through rounds of funding and you’re really making progress.

So people are biting what’s going on to that. and how do you talk with them about customer education? 

Sandi Lin: [00:39:45] So I may be opinionated. I don’t think there is a rainbow. I view it as very binary that CEO’s board members and investors. They either get it or they don’t. And either you get that customer’s important or you don’t, and it drives a lot of culture and behavior at different companies.

Now, the conversation has changed a lot over the last three or four years, even between our seed and series a, when we went out for our. Seed round. I can’t even tell you how many times I had to explain what is the difference between Skilljar and Coursera, which I think Coursera is a target towards universities at the consumer site where it’s moved.

It’s not the same thing at all, as a B2B platform. That’s, helping customers, companies, train customers. And I got that question too. It’s like, why would a company ever need to educate their customers? You really got that question. Yeah, I still get that question, Dave, you are bleeding edge. Just remember that.

Dave Derington: [00:40:48] we should know, but 

Sandi Lin: [00:40:50] that’s changing. Say, in the innovative tech scene, You know the conversation between our seed and our series a now it’s every single one of my companies and CEOs is talking about this problem and every single one needs this. So some of it’s timing, I think it’s partly a consequence of companies having gotten really good at sales and marketing over the last five years and outreach as part of that.

And now they’re playing catch up on the delivery and success side. But I would say there’s still a mindset shift happening around customer success broadly, including education as an investment and not a cost. And this is where I feel that CEOs either get it or they don’t. and. Your listeners, or you may not even know this, but the way financials are set up, every single dollar that goes into customer success eats into your margin.

And so if you’re a public company or even a company that’s thinking about going public, You’re being evaluated on, money, your margins, and, what’s your profit. And so even for progressive companies, there’s a systematic bias for this kind of anti services, flavor and services being whether it’s monetized or not being an investment in your customer base.

So solutions still tend towards, self service or whether the customer help themselves because. It’s a cost. Otherwise it’s not an investment, it’s a cost, but somehow sales and marketing and engineering are investments. So that’s a mindset shift, which is the pervasive view on wall street and in the C suite at large.

And it is changing. But. So this is where some people get it. And some don’t, some people get that customer success is an investment, no matter what the financials say. and if you think about CEOs or CFOs, the questions they’re thinking of, where should I invest X dollars to get Y return. And so again, it’s like companies understand investing in R and D too.

Build a new product or improve a product. And they understand investing in sales and marketing and you get a customer, but there’s no financial structure to understand about investing in customer success. It just shows up as a cost. And even you have to be really thinking long-term because it looks, it makes it look worse than your near-term financial.

So I would love one day for. Financials to be separated into new acquisition and then existing retention with separate sort of income statements, because in most organizations, customer success is actually responsible for far more revenue than new bowls. 

Dave Derington: [00:43:17] Good. and that’s because of its total lifetime revenue you’re 

Sandi Lin: [00:43:20] yearly basis.

I suspect that in many organizations, customer success is responsible for. As large of a book of business as new logo acquisition, but what is the investment being made in customer success, as opposed to, new, and I’m not saying companies should invest in, we’re obviously investing a lot in sales marketing ourselves, but there is a like systematic flavor of any dollar that you spend in CS as a cost.

Dave Derington: [00:43:46] Yeah. You’re giving me an idea. This was something Adam and I were talking at DevLearn and we started talking about. A funnel, the marketing funnel. And we were thinking about that in terms of education and one of the things that we’re starting to really see, it takes a lot to invest, to set up a customer education function, to do it really well.

And at a huge amount of scale, you can do it cheaply. But over time when you invest that money, at some point it flips and you’re starting to say, okay, I have to build all the content I have to you’re building. This is your product. I think that’s the, at least from my perspective, right? Education is your product.

It’s not an add on, it’s not a nice to have it is your product because it’s all of the, like we have at outreach and Gainsight and Azusa, it was all transitioning this, tribal knowledge in as something structured informal and for anybody to share. So it’s taking your mind and putting it in pixels. And I think that’s what is really hard to glom onto.

I see, I’m very thankful that customer success has become a thing, but customer education, I’m going to say this again. This is Adam’s quote, customer education is a scale engine for customer success. We’re implicit. We are customer success. There’s not really that much of a differentiator. And what we’re here to do is to drive that adoption and do things like you were saying, Hey, I got a new admin for my product and they came in and we already sold the deal.

we had our pro serve engagement done. they can come along and get that training. Hey, I need to sell somebody more training because Hey, my customer added 300 seats. what do I have to do? We’ll go back to pro serve or we can just get them on-demand training and do all that kinda stuff. So you have all these skews and offerings that we have in education that really support and accentuate what customer success can do and help to drive that revenue.

Pause. 

Sandi Lin: [00:45:32] Yeah, on the consumer side, imagine getting, buying a new gadget and not having like a. Manual or separate. some people don’t read the manuals, but 

Dave Derington: [00:45:40] dive right in, 

Sandi Lin: [00:45:41] in software, we can’t expect to just throw somebody a product and that they could use it, to its full potential.

but I do think the financial setup is important when you think at scale, because if there’s actually a disincentive for companies to invest in this function, from the way, outsiders view your financials, that is challenging. 

Dave Derington: [00:46:02] Okay, Sandy, this has been great. Let’s start wrapping up, but before we do so I always love to give our, sorry, I’m losing my train of thought here.

I’ll start up again. we’ll always like to have our guests tell a little bit about your company, your org, where to find you, what do they need to know about your product and your services? how can they get in contact with you? 

Sandi Lin: [00:46:27] So we’re at Skilljar.com. sounds spelled the same way. It sounds you can reach me sandy@skillshare.com.

I spell my name with an eye, S a N D I, and I’m trying to be a little bit more active on Twitter and LinkedIn. but I can’t guarantee that I’ll respond anytime soon on there. 

Dave Derington: [00:46:45] Awesome. Okay. thanks Sandy, for taking time out of your busy day to share your thoughts with us, this is really meaningful, and I love having this level of conversation because can go a lot of different ways and really helps our audience.

Now. like you were super passionate about customer education and we’re committed to connecting and growing this audience of leaders and. Also professionals are actively working and to get people the ideas they need to understand the field. So with that’s a wrap. Now, if you want to learn more, we have a podcast website@customer.education.

Yep. It’s simple as that. You can find our show notes and other material on Twitter. I’m @davederington. And you said you were at, 

Sandi Lin: [00:47:24] at. Sandy Eslan 

Dave Derington: [00:47:25] Sandy Aslan on the Twitters, and you can also find you on LinkedIn and me as well. Special. Thanks to Alan Koda for our awesome theme music and the last pitch I have to make to you.

Dear listeners, now this help you out. You can help us out by subscribing in your pockets of choice or leaving us a review on iTunes. Those two things really help expose our podcast to other people and to our audience. Thanks for joining us. Once again, go out there, educate experiment, and find your people.

Thanks everybody.

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