Wendy Hamilton: [00:00:00] Guess where our customers go to define customer training materials.
Dave Derington: [00:00:04] YouTube.
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 myths and bad advice. Stop growth dead in its tracks. I am Dave Derington and today we have a very special guest on the line. Oh, we have Wendy Hamilton was the CEO of TechSmith.
Welcome Wendy. Thanks for joining.
Wendy Hamilton: [00:00:37] Hi Dave. Thanks for having me.
Dave Derington: [00:00:40] Okay. Before we begin. And we’d like to hear all about your backstory and about your company and your hopes and dreams. We have a tradition here where we always do the national day of, and today we have two, it is national Mario day, which is funny.
And I’m sure a lot of Camtasia has been used to record YouTube videos of that.
And then it’s national pack, your lunch day. So what’s for lunch today, you already had lunch.
Wendy Hamilton: [00:01:08] I had, Annie’s organic, vegetarian, black bean soup. Very important. Sorry.
Dave Derington: [00:01:15] You’ve got Cracker volt on the street, right? Is that near your office?
Wendy Hamilton: [00:01:19] Unfortunately?
Four years. Yeah,
Dave Derington: [00:01:26] that’s the right word, unfortunately. All right. Okay. We got laughs going. That’s great. Let’s let’s kick this off. So this one would be a little bit different. Previous episodes. We have been doing a CEO track on our podcast and what we’ve really been trying to do is explore trends. And what is the, what are the things that you’re talking with?
With others about, and what’s your thought leadership that you bring to the table around customer education? TechSmith creates the products we know, and we love Camtasia. Snagit are amazing. And it, this is not, this is from the heart for me because I use your products, Wendy, every day, my team does, we love them.
for team starts starting out. This was great for teams that are scaling and doing great work. This is great. What I love most is something you said when your previous podcasts is the tools. Anybody can
Wendy Hamilton: [00:02:13] use. Yup.
Dave Derington: [00:02:14] so with that, let’s go ahead and start. And Wendy, what I’d like to do first is give you the mic.
tell me about your story and you have some interesting things in your background. tell me how you got to where you are today. What was your journey?
Wendy Hamilton: [00:02:28] My journey. out of, college, I was a mathematical economics major at a college. I joined, Anderson consulting Accenture now, and I did a cobalt programming initially.
Yeah, it goes way back. So I’ve been in the software production for a long time. I left, Accenture to join a, Adobe venture, startup tech startup, just@theendofthe.com phase. we did an IPO. we got acquired. We got acquired again. The second company that acquired us was Thomson Reuters. And I eventually ran a business unit for them as a general manager.
So a $15 billion company. and how did I get to TechSmith? I think a lot of people know it was, it’s a family business. It was, founded by my father over 30 years ago. And maybe about four years ago, we were both at the points in our career where we were looking for. A change. And I had always admired TechSmith, employee culture, the core values, the customer centricity, the technical innovation.
And that’s always been my background. So TechSmith is where I thought I could lead with the values and I wanted to lead with, which is what was important to me at that part in my career. So I love a tr Thomson Reuters and moved to Michigan and took over day-to-day leadership.
Dave Derington: [00:03:52] That’s fair. That’s fantastic.
That’s a great story too. And there’s a couple of things in there that I think are great. that consultative approach, that consultative mindset is so helpful in startups and you probably know as well as anybody that, in my space, in our space, I would say we’re being inclusive.
We have to think like that what’s the problem and the pain resolving. So here you are at text meth. You’re, you’ve taken the reins and it w we love your company, so good stuff,
Wendy Hamilton: [00:04:23] huh? By the way, thank you so much for saying that. And for the accolades, I. we have amazing employees who, I don’t know if it’s the Midwest culture.
If it’s always been the culture of the company, they genuinely want to serve customers and that’s their fuel, that’s their energy for being engaged. And half-assed, I appreciate it. Thank you.
Dave Derington: [00:04:43] And we hung out with, with Matt at, DevLearn just recently and just. Connected and he, and Adam and I have talked about things as well, let’s go forward again.
We want to be cognizant of your time. We have the first question here around the state of customer education. And what I want to do is frame this up. And again, this is our 34th episode of the podcast. We’ve been doing this for a while now. And what Adam and I are doing is that Wendy is really working with our audience to help build them up and build.
What, we haven’t really vocalized this, but what is customer education in our definition? And we define that as being a function that, okay, I’m going to use boring business words here. it’s strategically accelerates both account and user growth by changing behaviors. Reducing barriers to getting value, Learning our product, and then improving most importantly, the way people work, they do work. in a much larger company, you’re talking, talent development, learning, and development. It’s a little different. And here we are small groups, small teams trying to make a difference. and that’s where we don’t have a lot of resources.
And, I, my story is I naturally came to Cantasia because they go, okay. I could have used Adobe premier or something, but I can’t record video or I have to do all it just fit you fit with our market. So here’s our questions around us and sorry for ex positioning
Wendy Hamilton: [00:06:05] here.
Dave Derington: [00:06:07] Two questions.
Where are things today that you see as you get into customer education and what are some trends that you think can apply to this market?
Wendy Hamilton: [00:06:17] sure. first, I should clarify that within customer education, my own focus is specifically on software training, mean how to use an application interface.
so my comments are all in that context. So software industry is. Texts and us largest customer base. And a lot of those, they use it for everyday communication or employee training. But our growing use is really customer education. So external software training, so software, which is my background.
In my view is changed a lot and changed the whole role of customer education. When I worked at, big six, a system implementer, software was sold by high-end salespeople with big expense. Budgets and they, wine and dine, there may be two or three real choices for anything an organization would buy for software.
and only after the sale, as part of the sale was our customer education in the form of paid training, usually in classrooms. So customer education was part of that initial purchase and we serve lots of different types of, software companies. But Sofar as an industry is increasingly defined by.
A completely different model. It’s, startups storing up some technology on the internet, individual end users finding it through word of mouth, maybe digital marketing. I’ll usually in a free where cloud, SaaS rental model, right? So the customer onboarding is all self and. Tiredly realize I’m voluntary engagement and interest and persistence by that end user and end users who now generationally prefer video right to classroom JD.
Yeah. So ironically customer education, I think, is harder to measure the value of than the old days is a line item on an invoice. But it’s more important, so for me, I’m all about the business of software. That’s all I’ve done, all I’ve ever understood. And I would say training is actually the most important part of the business of software other than the product itself, because it matters to the fundamentals of the business models.
So free, where to paid conversion, renewals, retention. yeah, it’s just a whole new world. And. And in this kind of self-serve model, the training needs to be where and when the end user wants it, often global end users, it needs to be engaging. It needs to be completely, efficacious without support calls to tech support, because.
Those costs money too. And people, really, any users, customers you want to call them anyway. yeah, I think the other big trend, that we’ve been doing a lot of work with is a lot of that content, particularly when you talk about application training, technology, training needs to be created by the subject matter expert.
not by the learning professional, who’ve had to take a different role. And then, there’s a whole another problem that this type of content is. It’s increasingly overlapping with, tech support content or marketing content or product documentation content, or to the extent, your training partners or internal employees on the same apps, HR and sales content.
and if it’s not deliberately coordinated across all those groups, and sometimes even if it is it’s. Impossible to keep out, keep up with the amount of content that needs to be created, just because of the pace of technical change. Sorry that’s a whole bunch of stuff, but that’s what I see
Dave Derington: [00:09:56] you kind of brain dump that I have with my leadership.
Like we’ve got this and this and this and this. And they’re like, ah, where are you going to start building great content. We’re just going to get it done. We have a project plan. But, yeah, that’s and you’ve talked about some other things in previous, like I’ve listened to some of the podcasts you’ve given before where, generational, the generational thing that you’ve talked about.
It’s funny because, I’m a gen X, but I’ve been a teacher I’ve hung out and I’ve taught in universities and I’m leaning a lot more towards that. Okay. I’m going to video first and frankly, I might go to YouTube first and it’s really nice to have a captive portal, but when I went help, I’m out there.
And that’s a big difference in how you say that visually compelling information is much more important for what geographically distributed companies, this, all these things that we have to solve these problems for, which makes video. A really prime candidate, as a solution.
Wendy Hamilton: [00:10:52] Yeah. Yeah.
you, you said something else in there too. You said, you, to the startup public availability of content, I’ll tell you at TechSmith. we are the own and our own innovation. What we’re trying to do, we have. 65 million users globally. Half of our Camtasia customers have never used any kind of video editor before let alone a non-linear editors.
So it’s a big, tr training, challenge. we’ve built up. Zen desk tech support knowledge repository is even localized though. We have video training portals. Of course we do. we integrate product documentation into the product interfaces. We create formal certification courses.
We’ve got this free, Academy, video training. We have a peer to peer support online forum, which we nurture. And after all that, all those sources, guests, where our customers go to find customer training materials.
Dave Derington: [00:11:47] You can go to YouTube.
Wendy Hamilton: [00:11:49] Yeah. YouTube or Google. and that’s something we’re trying to figure out right now.
Like what do we need to do to optimize, training and support content for SEO, for search engine optimization, as opposed to marketing content. And what’s the difference in what does that need to look like? Because at the end of the day, like we. Want our customers to actually find the content.
That’s where they go to look for it. Yeah.
Dave Derington: [00:12:13] that’s awesome. And, let’s talk about customers more and again, this is a transition where we want to get on a day to day, like who. I know, and Adam knows that textbook’s products are what we have in our arsenal that we use every day there, And here’s the great thing about it. It’s not such a heavy lift to say I had a new contractor starting my team as an instructional designer and they go, Oh, we need another account. We’ll buy it. it’s not a cap ex expense or anything. Ridiculous. It’s within reach. and I love that. Here’s the question around your customers.
When, is there anything really interesting that’s going on within your base? what are the kinds of things that people are doing or the questions that people are exploring or in and around your products?
Wendy Hamilton: [00:12:59] Sure. a lot of the customer innovation, we’re seeing has to do with how bows and formal training roles are engaging subject matter experts to contribute content.
do the, you mentioned this before, but did the pace of change and the technical complexity of the subject matter, learning professionals often need the technical experts to crate some part of the content for that isn’t their day job either. It’s not necessarily what they want to be doing.
They certainly aren’t comfortable with. E-learning or even necessarily native video tools. our tools do have a good fit with SMEs for what you said. They have a low learning curve and a low seat price, but there’s still this sort of scale issue. Now we have one big fortune 500 customer, that has embraced that customer education needs to be part of the pre-sales process.
So they’ve engaged all their sales engineers, and you’re talking, a thousand sales engineers to rapidly create customized one-on-one training videos as part of the early sales process. We’ve actually, yeah, it’s pretty cool. Actually, we’ve worked with them to create this concept of templates, San Camtasia, that we’re doing more with in the next release where you can, that centralized learning professional can create.
Sort of the guard rails, the best practices, and in the case of sales, the branding and the professionalism to provide that quality consistent result that make it even easier for those SMEs, just to drop some content and then publish. that’s very formal. We have a whole other large, company that’s, experimenting with a completely different approach, which is to say, It just, you SMEs just go create some content on it and they’re using our video or review product, which is an online asynchronous video discussion thread to just incrementally improve that content and just constantly get feedback on it and try to make it better.
And their mantra was, they just need to get started with something and get. This idea of perfection out of the way. So let’s just tell them anything they want.
Dave Derington: [00:15:13] Perfection is the enemy of done.
Wendy Hamilton: [00:15:15] Then
there’s another area too. We see a lot of challenges, a completely different area, which has to do with the. Localization of customer education content for a global audience. some people take their English video and outsource it to people who, tiredly redo the screencasts with a localized version of the application interface, others, are doing things with, working with our internal experts to translate in subject matter what we’re interested in that we see some people doing Israeli playing with machine translated, captions, and how good that can be in, the appeal of that is just to get it into a much larger, Range of languages and would otherwise be assessable with those other approaches.
So that’s interesting too. How quickly can you repurpose English content to other languages? Yeah,
Dave Derington: [00:16:14] that’s amazing. And that’s important in, and around what you were talking about. You hit a couple of things that were interesting to the kind of work that I’m. Working on right now, I’m working, using work too many times.
I kind of work that my team is doing right now. We work for outreach and outreach as a sales engagement platform. And I, we have a platform that’s so unique, so interesting. We have a concept of a sequence and a sequence is let’s say one day I was trying to get you. To take interest in outreach and you had looked at a website and you had a forum and you get into that forum.
And I see that and you become a prospect and I’m a sales development rep. And I reach out to you and with all the excitement of world. Yeah. Tell you everything, but you want more. And I think this is, I really love what you brought up, how. Training can be a part of sales and what our team members love to do.
Our SDRs are amazing. You’ll see them out there all over the place on LinkedIn, talking about how outreach this outreach that is super cool. They’re super excited and they know what they’re talking about and they go and record a small video and then put it out there. Or we can create videos and put them in a sequence so impactful.
And I’ve loved that you bring that up.
Wendy Hamilton: [00:17:23] Yeah, no, absolutely. in inbound marketing is all about providing just great content and it’s usually the same thing as customer education content, right? We’re not necessarily seeing our customers. Of course, the ones we really understand often tend to be larger customers.
Break down those barriers, just to sterilely between user experience and marketing or customer education and sales. it’s unfortunate. I think there are a ton of synergies there.
Dave Derington: [00:17:54] Absolutely. All right, Wendy, let’s go into the last big subject area that we’d like to talk about on our podcast and for you, this is an opportunity to say, okay, I’m talking with a peer that’s now their CEO.
So the CEO to CEO advice level. what are the things that you and you are talking about when you have the opportunity to talk to a peer or a C-level exac a board member when we talk education. and I’ve got a couple of other questions and let me just feed you one at a time. So let’s start with that.
What are you talking with people about?
Wendy Hamilton: [00:18:28] if it comes to other CEO’s of my industry, I can tell you what I think we should be talking about, which is integration, synergy standards. I, my biggest concern on behalf of, Certainly video based customer education is that solutions for creating content and hosting content are not as plug and play as they need to be.
Long-term, to serve the customer candy. you’re laughing, I’m
Dave Derington: [00:18:56] laughing because I have to deal with that pain every day.
Wendy Hamilton: [00:18:59] we have our own online video hosting platforms for things like flip classroom flip meetings. but as for our creation products, Vision Snagit, we’re a hundred percent committed, that we’re storage agnostic, and we want these to, fully work on any platform and, have it have a rich experience, but not everyone is necessarily, thinking about it that way, thinking about, best of breed and bringing systems together.
And. So that lack of PO plug and play, it hurts content creators by increasing switching costs. Some of the injuries, reasonability often scalability of their own intellectual property. And for consumers, it limits. our ability to innovate with things like, interactivity, video, our activity, even simple things like hotspots and TOC is can completely be relied upon in a standard video player, which is unfortunate that now the counterargument, particularly for software training is maybe things like interactivity aren’t really as important or as pragmatic, but certainly for broader customer applications.
it, it becomes more important.
Dave Derington: [00:20:10] Cool. Yeah. that integration and all the things you’re talking about there, like how are we best using that and where can we use it? And Y it’s challenging, we use a platform called Skilljar, which is our LMS of choice and we can embed our content in that, and it works great.
but we also are interested in exploring things like Pendo and putting little videos in app itself. So that’s great. let me feed you the next question, regarding CEO to CEO advice. so when you’re talking with other execs, how is it that you talk about these things with them and these two relate and what kind of topics do they care about when you’re interacting with them, particularly around education?
Wendy Hamilton: [00:20:49] I know, I think more about, more customer CEOs, the big topics I’ve seen have been, scalability, how do we keep up with in a SaaS world applications that change maybe every two weeks. this question about, globalization, do we need to localize, to what extent do we need to localize?
what’s really practical with that pace of change. as well as what we were talking about before this sort of overlap with, marketing and, for the subset of our customers, who’s training content is publicly facing. What’s the role of YouTube going to be, as it moves more into the set of and Mario videos, it moves more into educational content for businesses.
If that circle, what role would that play and distribution of content,
Dave Derington: [00:21:45] that’s cool. So there’s a lot of stuff going on there. And, I keep thinking about that. there was a really great question that came up in a forum that I’m in on, it’s a private Slack channel, which it’s not so private, anybody can request, the customer education, Slack, and that was about, Hey, this person said, Hey everybody, I just saw some of my content training on my product, appear on LinkedIn and I didn’t make it.
And that can happen to any of us in this here’s something. I just wanted to pause it at your direction that I think more than ever leaders are finding others are crowdsourcing or doing things of their own design. I had one person on my team go and create these great administrative videos for our product on his own.
Pull up Camtasia started making this stuff. I’m like, Holy cow, this is wonderful. So that it’s this day of, we have a cottage industry where anybody can make the content and you’ve helped to make that happen too. and I don’t know where that’s going. Other than to say, we have to drop our guard as leaders and say, okay, anybody can create this content.
It’s going to benefit us, but when, what we want to do is control, not control the message, get the analytics of that. If somebody puts a YouTube post out there and it’s doing great for our business. Wonderful. but the thing that’s. Difficult to me. And you’re talking about all these things around analytics and integration and localization, all these things that had an executive level, we care a lot more about because we want to see, can I correlate ROI, no return on the investment for the product, for the work that I’ve done in education to validate this team and to show that it’s working to achieve my business outcomes.
It’s really complicated.
Wendy Hamilton: [00:23:29] Yeah. I, You know myself, I probably have jumped on for the ROI concern, just from the perspective of how can it not be critical to start with straight, like there’s no counter or you, them, this is not critical to serving your customers. Yeah, actually the analytics piece, I worry about we, I welcome other people creating, Training content, on our own products, some people have made career careers of it.
that’s fine. they’re filling in the gaps maybe that we can always fill in. My concern has always been, how do I know? Just because that exists doesn’t mean that our customers are actually getting their questions answered. it doesn’t actually mean that they’re successful. Like how do we figure that out?
Like how do we really monitor. That, Oh gosh, the first time, if someone downloads a trial, they pop up and see a non-linear editor video interface to their first time. How do I know they’re not just collapsing right there and giving up. in spite of all that training out there, that’s more for me.
The analytics question to solve is what are people searching for that they’re not finding.
Dave Derington: [00:24:33] That’s and that’s amazing. And you could do a lot with that with Google analytics. if you’re looking at your inbound, everything that people are searching, they’re hitting you on and use, you start to do a gap analysis and say, I’m looking for this.
I don’t have that content, or I’m going to this and that content exists, but it’s terrible. And this is a challenge for us because we move so fast. We just, the first wave, every time I come into a company and I’ve done this at Gainsight and Azuqua and outreach. Now the first pass is, look, we’ve got to build something.
We have nothing. And then you build that and then you come back and say, what’s working, what’s not and advance it. And it’s challenging. And that whole analytical question is okay. I made the content, it’s looking good. I’ve got great videos. Oh, it might be a fact that people are looking for a Spanish version of the content.
It’s a localization issue, or they’re looking for something that I didn’t have. So I’m glad that reaches your radar. That should, for every CEO at one stance of this question is It, the thing about customer education is that we have, and this is Adam’s quote, a customer education is the scale engine to customer success.
And it means it’s not the customer success team. It’s the customer’s success. Can they find what they need in the moment where it’s at in a simple to use form. And that’s why we tend to come back to in here. Here’s an apprehension that I see a lot of companies, my leadership has said this to me. Oh, Dave, this has got to be quality.
This has to be really high bar. And I go, no, it doesn’t. It’s got to get done. The customer’s not going to care as much about the Polish and the transitions and the animations. We’ll get those because, competition makes it pretty darn easy to do that on a dime, but it’s not as important as getting the content there the first time.
And like you said, Hey, it’s a subject matter expert. They may not be the best person to do it, but they certainly have the authority and we can come back and add that to a learning development professional later on. But that’s really just in world.
Wendy Hamilton: [00:26:24] Yeah, it’s a completely different mindset. Yeah. And the, and those are the problems we’re looking to solve even for ourselves and hopefully for our customers one day as well.
Dave Derington: [00:26:33] I think you’re going to get there. Let me ask you, I’m going to ask you one last thing to tap on one last thing. And if you have any other things, we’ll go through that. There was a quote you had that I saw listed. I think it was on a blog. You’re talking about STEM for kids and investment, and you’d cited a stat of.
And I might get this wrong. So I’ll caveat there was 15% of open technical jobs are going to need to be filled by us grads. And we don’t have them coming out of the institutions like we want. So you were talking about how we can start getting more people from STEM. And this is related to the CEO thing, because I don’t think a lot of people think about this.
I’m a scientist by education. I’m curious in chemistry, I landed in education and I landed in software and it’s because I. Kind of, I have that scientific, that’s what we call our podcast. CELab, the customer use a laboratory we’re experimenting, we’re having a hypothesis theories and we’re trying to test them.
can you tap on that a little bit more? I think that’s just really neat and it really maps to our field.
Wendy Hamilton: [00:27:35] sure. I want to Google quick and confirm the stat. I actually had a girls who code one of their websites. the reality is we don’t have enough. American college graduates to fill the it and, technical computer programming roles that are forecasts that it’s been a long known issue.
they’ll Gates, talked about it at a grand jury testimony like ages ago. and it’s only gotten worse, not better. Text specific focus, in a large part of my kind of personal, background just independently has always been, getting more underrepresented populations into STEM, breaking down those barriers.
and we haven’t done a lot in our local community. That’s where most of our, resources go or charity goes, and it starts around fourth or fifth grade to try and help inspire kids. It could be a career for them and expose them to something maybe they hadn’t seen before, but there’s a lot of support structure that is needed, between that and, college internships.
And we’re trying to help each part of the way, at least in our local community.
Dave Derington: [00:28:46] Fabulous. I love it. Okay. being cognizant of time, let’s go ahead and start wrapping up. Wendy. Is there anything else that you’d like to share with our audience today?
Wendy Hamilton: [00:28:56] if you’re a customer or not a customer, either way, you might be interested in our free courses on, video creation, which I’m sure well from Matt, texts with Academy is a free online learning platform with courses to help you learn more about visual communication and video creation.
We’ve had tens of thousands of people now, through those courses and, keep expanding them. Th the other thing. And if you cut this from the web, from the podcast, because of, irrelevance that it’s fine, what is on our minds right now is how to support our customer community, who are suddenly transitioning to remote learning and remote work practices because of COVID 19.
we want to be a good community citizens, so we’re announcing probably. Tomorrow or the next day that we’re gonna provide, Snagit and video review, for free until the end of June, for any, yeah. so I don’t have the website up cause it’s not up yet. but by the time this airs, anyone who needs that or who would be benefiting from that can find out more on our social media channels.
Dave Derington: [00:30:07] And that’s great. Cause I was going to ask you about that, Wendy, that with this is an interesting time. And having that an educator and doing a lot of virtual and on-demand content, this is the time to shine. And, if any of you are listening out there, we’ll definitely provide links, Wendy, as soon as you have them, give, TechSmith products, your attention, use them.
If you are somebody that’s, trying to build some content right now, and you don’t know how this is how it’s a great way to get started, it’s easy to learn and it’s a lot of fun.
Wendy Hamilton: [00:30:38] No, that’s it. techsmith.com. I’m showing my age, but I’m a reachable on LinkedIn. My handle is Wendy Hamilton. No dashes, no numbers. That’s how I’m showing my age. So I think
Dave Derington: [00:30:51] definitely
Wendy Hamilton: [00:30:52] it’s there. Yeah, I got in early.
Dave Derington: [00:30:54] Oh my gosh. Okay. Again, thanks for taking time out of your busy day to share your thoughts.
like you were passionate about customer education. We’re committed to connecting our growing audience of leaders, professionals, the people and ideas. They need to understand the field. So with that, this is a wrap. If you want to learn more, can we have a podcast website@customer.education? That’s great.
Great domain. You can find show notes and other material there. And I am @davederington on LinkedIn and a Twitter special thanks to it for our theme music. And if this helps you out. You can help us out by subscribing in your pod, catcher of choice or leaving a review on iTunes. Those two things really help us expose podcasts to other people in our audience.
Thank you for joining us. Go out, educate experiment, and find your people. Thanks everybody.