Dave Derington: [00:00:00] Hey, Adam.
Adam Avramescu: [00:00:00] Hey, Dave.
Dave Derington: [00:00:01] Today is an exciting day. Isn’t it?
Adam Avramescu: [00:00:04] Yeah, sure is. But wait, I forgot. Why is today so exciting
Dave Derington: [00:00:07] because we’ve launched our customer education manifesto.
Adam Avramescu: [00:00:10] Manny Festo.
Dave Derington: [00:00:12] Yes, that’s right. just how agile software developers created a manifesto back in 2001 that shaped the future of the industry.
We’ve spent some time in pulled together insights and six key principles into a short statement about what modern customer educators like us believe we’ve
Adam Avramescu: [00:00:27] it’s 2020. It’s about time for a manifesto. I love it. Six key principles sound super concise. Where can I find it? Did we nail it to the door of a church?
Dave Derington: [00:00:37] We did not. And those are theses, right?
Adam Avramescu: [00:00:40] Oh silly me,
Dave Derington: [00:00:42] but seriously, we had it pretty easy for you to find it’s right over our website customer.education. And if you look at the top nav, you’ll find a link for a manifesto click that you’ll be right there.
Adam Avramescu: [00:00:51] that’s great. I can just click that and read the manifesto.
Oh, it looks like I can sign it too. Cool.
Dave Derington: [00:00:55] And that’s right. That’s really important to us. If you go in and read the manifesto, you feel like it resonates with you. Sign the page. We’re going to add your name to the list and you can show that you’re in this elite group of modern customer educators.
Adam Avramescu: [00:01:07] Oh, geez.
I better hurry up and sign
Dave Derington: [00:01:09] something tells me you’re already on the list.
Adam Avramescu: [00:01:12] It’s not like we wrote it.
Dave Derington: [00:01:16] Welcome to CELab, the customer education laboratory, where we explore how to build customer education programs, to experiment with new approaches and exterminate the myths and the bad advice that some people keep telling us. And we say, Nope, stop that. Stop that stop
Adam Avramescu: [00:01:38] collaborate. And listen.
Dave Derington: [00:01:40] Indeed. I am Dave Derington.
Adam Avramescu: [00:01:43] And I am Adam Avramescu here on national anisette day.
Dave Derington: [00:01:49] What does that
Adam Avramescu: [00:01:51] have you ever had, ouzo or Sambuca? Oh,
Dave Derington: [00:01:54] yes. Okay. I got it now. That’s cool.
Adam Avramescu: [00:01:56] Like Aness or licorice based spirits.
Dave Derington: [00:01:59] Yeah. I looked at that first and were like, what is this? Very good. So it’s a spirits kind of
Adam Avramescu: [00:02:06] day. I feel spirited.
I’m ready for a spirited discussion.
Dave Derington: [00:02:11] I’m sure we’re going to have that. And if you recall, we had done a previous episode are. First full on a mailbag episode. And this one, we’re going to be continuing with a question that Gordon Mack from Vox had sent us. So let’s start off. We’re going to play his second question.
And then like we did last episode, we’re going to respond and we were going to get into a heated discussion. So here we go. Hey, Adam and Dave,
Adam Avramescu: [00:02:39] this is Gordon. I work at box, the cloud content management company as the learning technology manager. And I’m based out of the San Francisco Bay area. My second question is,
Dave Derington: [00:02:49] do you have any tips to enable instructional designers and content developers to
Adam Avramescu: [00:02:53] be self-sufficient in regards to refreshing content in the LMS without needing to go through an LMS admin?
Or take LMS
Dave Derington: [00:03:02] admin training.
Adam Avramescu: [00:03:03] I asked this question because
Dave Derington: [00:03:05] COVID-19 has forced many
Adam Avramescu: [00:03:06] companies to leverage cloud storage services and to store their course content like SCORM and video files in the cloud.
Dave Derington: [00:03:14] Wouldn’t it be nice if
Adam Avramescu: [00:03:15] updated course content files didn’t need to be re uploaded
Dave Derington: [00:03:19] into the LMS manually.
I would love to hear
Adam Avramescu: [00:03:23] if anyone has found or created a reliable solution. Thank you for always putting on a fantastic podcast and thank you for taking my questions. Okay. So I remember this question. Now, this is really thinking about the admin overhead for IDs, instructional designers and content developers working in an LMS.
Like how do we really make sure that they can keep. Their content updated without necessarily needing to learn all the ins and outs of the LMS. So interesting. Dave, what do you have thoughts here?
Dave Derington: [00:03:58] Yeah, where we would start is. Many customer LL messages do provide a role that it’s not like a full admin, right?
it’s Oh gosh, you know what we were on with, a different vendor. This was an LMS product. And we were talking about these different kinds of roles. and in fact, they had a God level global administrator then a regional administrator content manager. Yeah. Demi Gorgon, what I’m
Adam Avramescu: [00:04:23] going.
But I like.
Dave Derington: [00:04:26] You’re like where my brain is headed. yeah, it’s. I think I see where we’re going here. we’re in a, we’re in a context of, Hey, we’re in times of COVID I’m not in an office. I have a team. I don’t want to put all the burden on one person. Fair.
Adam Avramescu: [00:04:38] Are roles are reviewer roles in a lot of LMS as to that aren’t necessarily like that one.
God administrator role. Yeah. That,
Dave Derington: [00:04:44] that one got administrator. Yeah, you can have certain people will say, Oh, okay. You’re just doing content, but an administrator has to actually approve that or review it, or maybe there’s a review mechanism or something like that. maybe you might be using like a separate cloud base, content management system for video.
Like we use Wistia. I’ve used Wistia a lot. It’s really good.
Adam Avramescu: [00:05:02] yep.
Dave Derington: [00:05:03] it is possible that. The way, some of those embed content, you might be able to swap out core assets, without even knowing, watching the LMS, it’s
Adam Avramescu: [00:05:12] there’s like a source file in Wistia and that source file can be swapped out.
You have the same embed link. So if the LMS is calling that particular embed from Wistia and you’ve swapped out the source file, then they don’t actually ever have to go in the LMS.
Dave Derington: [00:05:27] Yeah, that’s right. have you seen any really good solutions though? for us?
Adam Avramescu: [00:05:31] I don’t know if there are a lot of super elegant solutions around this.
Like I would actually think in some ways, I don’t know. I don’t know if I would shy away from just giving my authors an author role in the LMS and giving them a little bit of enablement to be dangerous in there. Cause I think part of the symptom here might be if an admin. But Gordon called out, like sending someone to admin training to be able to use the LMS.
Yeah. I would question maybe like how much training should an individual author need to be able to use an LMS?
Dave Derington: [00:06:05] Yeah, because the systems I’ve used, if I’m just gonna be honest and I’ve had this situation and basically I have one person on my team at a couple different companies and that person is more or less the admin.
It doesn’t mean they always do it, but when they can’t do their job, Thing they’re on vacation or whatever. It’s really been like 15 minutes, maybe a half an hour where we sit down and say, we need to do this. It’s really okay. Most of the application makes sense, but there’s a couple of places like that are gotchas and we get past that.
Anybody can do this. The only caveat is, do you want everybody mucking about in that system? And I’ll give you an example. a current currently I’ve had, three separate teams using the platform I use and we’ve had only minor issues. And so I think you should be largely able to trust others to be able to use your platform without damaging it.
And without a lot of training, that’s all I want to say. It’s depending on your platform, I know that the ones that I’ve used have been pretty darn easy. Yeah.
Adam Avramescu: [00:07:04] Yeah. I just, I don’t know. There’s not one super simple elegant solution to this. I wish there was. there are some folks who even do completely.
Custom solutions where they have this built upon their corporate website. And they’re doing this all via pull requests, but I think for most, they’re not really doing it that way. There, they have an LMS in place and the simplicity or lack thereof of the LMS is also going to dictate. whether you want to just give someone off their permissions in there, or whether you want to try to find some other way to get content to auto-sync.
Dave Derington: [00:07:34] Yeah, I think it’s just a measure, a matter of how technically sophisticated your deployment structure is. So if you keep it simple, go with the kiss theory, keep it simple. Then you probably weren’t, aren’t going to have a lot of problems with administration overhead. but if you have a more complicated system, for example, one I used to use was it was, you said poll requests actually had something set up and get hub.
And it was, I’m not remembering the name of the product right now. Hiro is something, it was really cool, but it was actually hard to learn because you had to know how to use, a subversion. Okay. a content control, a control system.
Adam Avramescu: [00:08:10] Oh yeah. I remember using some version.
Dave Derington: [00:08:12] Yeah, it was not easy.
Not necessarily easy, actually. No, I’m sorry. It was this version. I’ve used that in another role, it was get. Get home.
Adam Avramescu: [00:08:20] Yeah.
Dave Derington: [00:08:20] And it wasn’t bad, but it can get weird because when you’re trying to do things like push and pull, I think it conflicts, and even me, it was just a little bit too much.
Adam Avramescu: [00:08:29] Yeah. I think that the other thing maybe that’s worth mentioning here is that this feels like a problem that has been explored more deeply in the world of documentation and tech pubs than in the world of customer education.
So there are methodologies out there, data, which. I’m going to see if I can remember what that stands for. It’s like the Darwin information typology. I don’t remember what the AA is. but you basically have different classifications of content that can be updated in different ways, depending on the objective.
And then they can be slotted into different forms of documentation. But if you’re going to move to data, you need to be at a scale where your content strategy supports that level of administration overhead. So at a certain point, you really, you need to be able to make a decision between. Like how automated do I want this whole system to be like, do I really not want anyone mucking around in the source files?
I don’t want anyone mucking around in any of the content files and re uploading things to the LMS versus like when, when will, creating a system like that, actually just add even more admin overhead.
Dave Derington: [00:09:31] Yeah. It’s a tricky, it’s a really good question. So Gordon, thank you for that. We obviously spent a lot of time trying to answer it.
Yeah.
Adam Avramescu: [00:09:38] If anyone does have a good solution to this cause. I will admit, I have not seen a super elegant solution to this in customer education. If anyone does have one, please write in and let us know, and, or you could record your answer and we will play it on air at some point.
Dave Derington: [00:09:52] Indeed love it. Now that’s actually really good.
Having other people bring in their answers to our questions, maybe we’ll do a reverse mailbag.
Adam Avramescu: [00:09:59] Yeah. It’s before we were doing, you’ve got mail, which is what was the Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, and now we’re doing a pay it forward. I don’t remember who was in that was that Haley Joel Osment.
Who was in that movie?
Dave Derington: [00:10:11] Yeah, I think so.
Adam Avramescu: [00:10:12] Okay, cool. It’s been a while onto the next one.
Dave Derington: [00:10:15] All right. What are we going to receive mail from this time out?
Adam Avramescu: [00:10:18] All right here, I’m going to ruffle through the
that’s good. that joke hasn’t gotten old yet. this next letter is from Alex Forbes from bot industries. So let’s hear what he has to say.
Dave Derington: [00:10:31] Hi Adam, Alex Forbes thought industries. Love your podcast. Based on the results of our 2020 state of customer training report. We launched in April. I know our customers would love to know when launching a customer training program for the first time.
What percent of learners should they expect to join? Thank you so much. That’s an interesting question. Okay. So where we’re launching an education program for the first time, and he’s asking what percent of learners should. W who, how many people are going to start to come to that program?
Adam Avramescu: [00:11:07] Yeah. And so I guess, what are the, what’s the baseline?
Dave Derington: [00:11:11] it’s going to be hard.
Adam Avramescu: [00:11:13] is it a punt to say it depends because I’ll tell you where I’m coming from. there are some baselines out there. One, one relies on how you define what percent of learners, because you could be talking about what percentage of accounts. that’s like your install-based penetration, right?
I’m thinking about the TSIAreport that we reviewed a few episodes
Dave Derington: [00:11:31] ago. Numbers. Yeah, let’s go there.
Adam Avramescu: [00:11:33] You could do the install-based penetration. So in that report, if I remember correctly, you had 37% of accounts of like of the total accounts that consume training. And then there was a separate one about user penetration within the accounts, 31% of the addressable users in the account consumed training.
So you effectively had that. 37% of no, it’s 31% of 37%. And there you get your baseline, all users in your install base who might consume training, but these are also more mature orbs for the most part, too. if you’re just launching a customer education program for the first time, then you probably don’t have those guidelines either.
Dave Derington: [00:12:16] Okay. so you’re giving us some benchmarks. I want to give some thoughts here and again, they may be. I’m not trying to be argumentative. I’m not trying to be contentious, but I have to say, I just
Adam Avramescu: [00:12:26] can’t help it. Yeah, I can’t do on this show.
Dave Derington: [00:12:30] Here’s what I’ll say to this question. Who cares? really who cares?
I know we care. I care, but there’s the saying. And again, I think we lost attribution for this. it’s the original field of dreams modified for customer education. If you build it, they won’t come. Say it again, if you build it, they won’t come. Just because my friends, you are making great content, amazing content stuff that everybody’s going to dream about.
Maybe, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve. There are people are just going to go, Oh my God. And they’re just going to flood into it. They will, but there’s work to be done. so for example, what I’m trying to get at is. You’ve got to sell it. You’ve got to think about it. You got to think like a marketing person.
You’ve got to think, how am I going to promote this material? And it’s really easy and I’ve done this before. I’m like, Oh my God. I’m so heads down and making the content. It’s really good. I’m reviewing it. I’ve got a lot of things to think about just building it. But if you have forgotten how that gets.
Sent out, is it in your CSM teams? webinars, somebody mentioning this, is that, do you have a campaign? Do you have marketing material? Do you have all this stuff? You’ve got to think a little bit larger and sell it. You know what I mean?
Adam Avramescu: [00:13:42] Yeah. going back to the question it’s. You’re right.
There’s not necessarily a strong baseline. That’s out there. Like you could use the TSIA ones as comps if it’s a storefront. But if you’re first starting your program for the first time, you’re probably not necessarily going to have the exact same scenario that TSIAis user base is in, those are again, more mature, organizations, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to have to aim lower than 37% or 31% in a way.
I agree with you that. I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s who cares, but it’s
Dave Derington: [00:14:15] your piece to say, just be contentious.
Adam Avramescu: [00:14:17] You’re sign is your baseline is the way that I would put it, Like when I think about starting a program and when I think about how many people are going to, engage with it, I’m going to make the assumption in the first place that whatever that number is, I’m going to have to dry, drive it up over time.
Because to your point, Dave, you are going to need CSMs to start. Distributing it you’re going to need them to start working into their onboarding plans. You’re going to need to work with your marketing team to get it onto your website or through email campaigns or nurture campaigns or whatever it is.
wherever you start is an opportunity to drive up from. And I don’t know that aiming for an arbitrary percentage, even if it’s an arbitrary percentage that is validated by your peers engagement rate, like your product and your customers are inherently going to be a little bit different. Anyway. yeah, it’s just, I would say it’s more about observing what your actual baseline is and then starting to set goals to improve from that baseline.
whatever your first, let’s say you start by measuring this and you find out that 7% of your customer base is using your, education product. Okay. then how do we in the next quarter, take it from seven to 10. And then the next quarter, how do we take it from 10 to 15? How do we take it from 15 to twenty-five?
Like it’s I think it’s more about understanding where you personally are starting from.
Dave Derington: [00:15:36] I think there’s a really great way of looking at it. I think what we’re trying to say, then Adam is it’s you can look at baselines for the industry. They’re probably not going to be relevant to what you are, where you are at, particularly in an early phase, a lower, a younger organization, right in.
Earlier in the maturity continuum, and you need to build it. you need to advertise it. You need to promote it. There’s a lot of things. This is why being a customer education, professional, I think is actually challenging. And it’s also pretty exciting if you’re not matrixing and working with other departments and thinking about.
The bigger picture. It’s easy not to be, not to do that and easy to get pigeonholed, but to be thinking broadly, who is this going to? What’s my audience. Have you surveyed that audience? Do you know what they’re looking for? one thing there’s a couple of tricks that I’ve used. If you start surveying people, let’s say you get a new job or you’ve been in a job for a few months and you’re working as customer education professional, it’s super impactful to survey your customer base and to say, Hey, we’re thinking about.
Blah, blah blah, with building a new university, making some training courses and you bring them into that dialogue. I’ve found that really primes the pump and people are like, Oh my gosh, you mean, you’re asking me, this is awesome. And then even getting going further and talking with them on the phone, if you can, for a couple of cases that at Gainsight that helped me so tremendously did it again, it is equal.
And to do it again at outreach, it’s something that like brings a customer in to tell you, help tell you what they think they need and what they know they need. And then they’re like, you offered it. I’m going to come back.
Adam Avramescu: [00:17:06] Yeah. So you’re you’re talking about the idea here of combining some voice of the customer, some user research with the idea of developing some sort of baseline or a prototype.
Yeah. So if you can put a prototype in front of some of those customers say, this is what we’re thinking of doing, are we headed in the right direction? Would this meet your need? Then you’re going to add up. Building something if you’ve done enough of that will probably be leading you in the right direction.
Yeah.
Dave Derington: [00:17:32] I think I’m getting a little off base with this, but the point is that if you’re bringing your customers in early, you’ve already done a promotion and you’ve piqued their interest. Most customers are looking for something that will help them on demand just in time and or maybe they want training and they’ll tell you, so don’t be afraid to ask them and bring that into that dialogue when you start.
Adam Avramescu: [00:17:53] this actually, this brings me back when I think about the question again. the question was when launching a customer education program for the first time, what percent of learners should we expect to join? And I think the word joined there is interesting because when you’re first starting a customer education program, learning might not necessarily be something that you join.
Like I’ve started several times now at companies where. Learn it like the learning materials when I joined were effectively some docks, right? there was a knowledge base. The knowledge base is probably incomplete and inaccurate. And so you actually have a baseline even there about what customers are doing to educate themselves and whether that is or isn’t working, because typically if you have a set of docs, You can jump into Google analytics, you can get the views for that doc.
you can look in that platform, usually like whatever you’re using to serve your help center and see the upvotes and downvotes on that article. And so you have a bit of a way to get insight into discoverability and value, and there you can start to make some hypotheses about, okay. If I. it’s less important to me to say what percentage of my customers are looking at this and more important to say, when I look at all the docs that currently exists, which ones get the most views today, which ones get the least or fewest, which ones are the most highly rated, which ones are the least highly rated and why?
And now you’re talking about something that’s a little bit, it’s a little bit deeper than how many people joined it’s how are customers getting educated today? Yeah, so I don’t know. It might be a different way to look at the same question. I re
Dave Derington: [00:19:26] I really actually dig that. I think both you and I have come at it from a different angle, but it’s that analytical?
we’ve got stuff. What’s it doing? That’s super cool.
Adam Avramescu: [00:19:36] Yeah. Or like same thing, right? Like your CSMs are already delivering training. How many customers are they delivering it to? And what’s the feedback on it?
Dave Derington: [00:19:42] Yeah. And if you don’t have that start adding little things, like little surveys and stuff, the point being that there’s probably some baseline material you can work with.
I think that’s what you’re saying, right?
Adam Avramescu: [00:19:50] Yeah. That’s what I’m saying. And I’m saying that you can also start to prototype things, right? if you know that there’s one article or three articles, let’s say that perform really well. And those also contain a lot of the same content that an onboarding would like, maybe you’re developing a quick start guide.
Maybe you’re developing, the first version of your Academy. You can prototype. what a lot of that information might look like. You might just be sequencing some of the articles that already exist in your help center into a quick-start guide prototype that put that in front of customers, get a reaction from them.
You’re capturing the voice of the customer. Now you’re iterating. Now you’re figuring out how to do the next version of it, more scalable, and start to see what the uptake of that looks like.
Dave Derington: [00:20:28] Yeah.
Adam Avramescu: [00:20:29] I just think it’s about iteration more than baseline.
Dave Derington: [00:20:31] Iteration. Yeah, we are. We are inherently agile as customer education professionals, whether we like to admit it or not.
Adam Avramescu: [00:20:39] Alright,
Dave Derington: [00:20:40] good. Shall we go on to last? This is amazing question. So thanks Alex for that. who’s our last contestant.
Adam Avramescu: [00:20:47] we actually have, you know how sometimes people say long time listener, first time caller. this time we actually have a. Second time caller. And that this is actually someone who’s been on the show before.
So we have a Daniel quick, who was a guest on our show a few episodes ago, writing back end. So let’s hear what he has to say.
Dave Derington: [00:21:09] Hi, this is Daniel quick.
Adam Avramescu: [00:21:11] I’m a former guest on your show. And I have a question
Dave Derington: [00:21:14] where do you think the customer education
Adam Avramescu: [00:21:16] function best fits within an organization?
Dave Derington: [00:21:20] Okay. I think that’s going to be a good discussion for us.
I’m actually really passionate about getting to the root of this and let’s just dive in, let me frame it up and say the most common, places that you might have your organization, Daniel, our customer success. Of course. because we. We really assert and feel that customer education has come out of that extracted from it, but professional services as well, which is also, we have come out of an emerge from, but also you have marketing and you have product, you may have other places.
are there any more that pop to mind?
Adam Avramescu: [00:21:57] I once reported until Eagle
Dave Derington: [00:21:59] legal. Yeah, I
Adam Avramescu: [00:22:01] did. I did. I was customer location reporting into legal. It was amazing.
Dave Derington: [00:22:05] Yeah, that makes sense. I guess you could be an HR as well. If you were more of an L&D team in an L&D team, but you were a unit of that. I haven’t, I would love to hear if anybody has done that.
So what are some pros and cons to each? So let’s tear through these because I think you and I both have had, and we both have three recent experiences in completely different companies. So six, all in all, we can go through the spectrum, right?
Adam Avramescu: [00:22:26] Yeah. And so I think the one that you and I probably have the most experience with is ultimately customer success, right?
Dave Derington: [00:22:31] Yeah, absolutely.
Adam Avramescu: [00:22:33] Yeah. So like you mentioned like the modern idea of customer education comes out of the idea of customer success. There’s definitely, there are education services teams that are pivoting towards more of a customer success model. But I think the way that a lot of us who are starting customer education from scratch in the cloud are coming out of this model of customer success.
Dave Derington: [00:22:53] Yeah. It’s, it naturally, this is inherently, we’re thinking about scale. We’re thinking about adoptions. we also have some of the best access to our customer base, which is super helpful because we can get feedback and we can build with the customer in mind. how about we talk about.
Th those are good things, but what are some cons like what does some things that we might like? I know I have some, so I’m, I can start this one off if you want, but what do you think, what are other potential pros or cons?
Adam Avramescu: [00:23:25] I think with customer success, customer success obviously think about voice of customer.
Like we were talking about iterating in the last question. if you actually want good access to the customer, Being in customer success and being able to sit side by side with CSMs or support agents, might be a customer experience team that you’re going to have a lot of really good access to customers when you’re working directly with CSMs.
Like you can ask them questions about how customers would receive this piece of feedback, if not actually talk to the customers themselves. So I think that’s, that’s a really interesting pro yeah. It’s also a fairly cross-functional organization. Typically CSM sit at the center of a lot of the conversations between.
Product and marketing and sales. because again, they’re representing and advocating for the customer themselves. What do you think?
Dave Derington: [00:24:09] Yeah, I think so. And because I know an organization organizations I’ve been in support could roll up to see us pro serv con professional services are, I tend to abbreviate, Ken roll up and you may have, operations, all these different teams roll into that.
So CS teams are predominantly quite large. one of the things that I, I. Do have to say here that it is a challenge. That’s been a challenge for me. I don’t know about you, but I’ll commonly CSMs used to do your job,
Adam Avramescu: [00:24:39] right? they like CSM is an early stage in a company. Like a lot of what they do is training.
Yeah.
Dave Derington: [00:24:44] and that’s, that’s significant. That’s really important in you. If you’re coming into a new organization, you should understand that and work with it because. let’s talk about this from an emotional standpoint. One thing that I love about working with customer success managers and CS teams in particular is how much they are in or involved in the customer life.
I’ve had CSMs that are friends, right? that I know I continue a relationship. after I’d been at the company or I’ve been working with a vendor even. So I w I don’t know if you’d call that, Oh, gosh, what’s the syndrome Stockholm
Adam Avramescu: [00:25:23] syndrome
Dave Derington: [00:25:23] thing and Stockholm syndrome here, Oh man.
is this an abusive relationship with the product? And, but my save, I don’t know. Wouldn’t
Adam Avramescu: [00:25:29] save me. Where are you going with this?
Dave Derington: [00:25:31] I’m going with a, is that it’s really hard to let go. Yeah. If you’re a CSM and you’re really passionate, you, it feels good to help. It feels good.
Adam Avramescu: [00:25:40] Yeah. Yeah. And you feel like you’re losing a touch point with the customer when someone else comes in and says, Hey, we’re doing training now.
Dave Derington: [00:25:45] Yeah. And for me, this is something I’m really passionate about trying to get out to you, the listener, if you’re in customer success indefinitely, what you have to think about this. We have to think about something that’s important, which is scale. If you’re a CSM and you’re training and you like it, you might even, you might be really good at it.
You might not be really good at it, but you’re going to keep doing it because you think it provides value. Now, I show up that disrupts everything, because what I’m going to say to you is your job is not to train. I know you like it. I know you love it, but that’s not that’s taking how many hours out of your day.
And I’ve looked at the numbers. It’s staggering. The amount of time that customer success managers do an actual training activity because they’re like,
Adam Avramescu: [00:26:27] Oh,
Dave Derington: [00:26:27] I’ll just get the team on,
Adam Avramescu: [00:26:29] on the call. They do it because like proper onboarding and proper education is a huge lever in terms of ultimately preventing churn and increasing customer health.
But that doesn’t mean that every CSM should spend. An ungodly amount of their time doing it because you know what, there’s still going to be opportunities for that CSM to work strategically with the customer and to educate them, even if there’s another department called or another team called customer education that is giving them more of a platform to be able to do it at scale, right?
Like the CSM still gonna be able to come in and do some of those things they’re going to need to at times. So I agree. I think that can be a challenging dynamic sometimes. And the other thing that I think when I think about customer success is that. When we think about working with customer success leaders, we do want to draw a distinction between, we say customer education is the scale engine of customer success, because we’re thinking about CSMs and support agents who are spending times doing things manually that could be scaled into a customer education program that does it more effectively so they can focus their time on more strategic things.
But what we don’t necessarily mean is customer education itself is not necessarily the same thing as scale customer success. because there are teams that are entirely responsible for a low touch or tech touch customer success, and they’re running campaigns and they’re, sending out newsletters and they’re doing a bunch of stuff that helps communicate with customers at scale.
And obviously education programs should be a huge part of that. But education programs should also be a big part of your high touch customer success strategy too. So I think that one risk in putting it in. customer success is it doesn’t have like proper sponsorship as its own pillar that supports both your high touch and your scalable customer success motions, versus it just being perceived as something that only helps customer success.
Dave Derington: [00:28:17] Yeah. I could go on in this subject for quite a while. there’s definite pros and cons. I want to give some recommendations though, because I think you, as a customer education leader, you’re going to come in. or even anybody that’s first kicking off a program, you could be a CSM that’s been assigned to a project to help build education out.
Doesn’t matter. The thing that you’re going to have to do is effectively turn an aircraft carrier with a Topo, with not a towboat with a robot. you are, you’ve got
Adam Avramescu: [00:28:43] a lot of robot and the tugboat. Put together, right?
Dave Derington: [00:28:45] To-go yeah, I just, I forwarded that up. I see the tugboats out my window of obviously.
you’re you have a lot of work to do, because again, you’re fighting the good nature of people who want to help and you have to somewhat convince them that, Hey, I’m going to take this load. You can do that by communicating numbers. You can do that by engaging those. Those CSM says, subject matter experts to help pull their mind share off.
And when you’re doing that, you can affect a change in their minds because you say, look, I’m converting your words into pixels and I’m getting it into the paper. I’m getting it out there for you. I’m amplifying you so that you can say, Oh, look, we’ve created this on-demand course. Once you go look at that and then come talk to me.
And now my com conversation is strategic, not training. give them credit for it, help them build the program and be interlocked with them. That’s my recommendation because it’s very easy to get turtled and start focusing on building curriculum and you’re gone for months and then come back and your CS teams, like, where are you?
We built all this other stuff. It happens.
Adam Avramescu: [00:29:44] Yeah. CSMs will very quickly start modifying whatever deck they use, create new version of the deck. Like they can work really quickly, even if they’re not doing all the instructional design and. Usually there’s a lot more CSMs in there. Our customer education people too.
that can, that content can start to balloon out. Okay. We’ve talked a lot about CSP. We’ll probably not talk as much about some of the other ones, but I think that like CS is, it’s certainly the most common place for education’s live in an org. let’s talk though about larger orgs, often.
By that point, you either have different departments for customer success and services, or you have services that lives within customer success, but either way, there’s an idea here that education might be within professional services.
Dave Derington: [00:30:28] Yeah. And that changes things quite a bit. Now you’re now, but going back to some previous questions we had about, when do you go to fee base training?
you’re starting to think about a revenue driving program. you’re thinking about certifications. those are usually a paid thing. Now you’re getting, maybe gets subscriptions training subscriptions that include different libraries, and then you have premium offerings. There’s a lot going on.
You’re growing up. you’re in the big leagues now because you have customers that, you’re talking about going up market. You’re going enterprise.
Adam Avramescu: [00:30:57] Yeah. So at a certain point when you’re serving an enterprise audience, especially if you’re in a B2B company, because granted not everyone who listens to us are doing B2B software, but, when you’re doing B2B enterprise software, there’s an expectation that customers have at a certain point that you’re just going to.
Come out and train them, or you’re going to do private training for them. And at that point, you want to make sure that you can resource it, which means that it needs to be paid, which means that often you’re running on a P and L. So I think there’s a perception that at a certain point, when your education team grows up and I’m putting that in scare quotes, that they run as an education services team.
And that was certainly true in the old world of. Enterprise B2B software, because you would come out, you would do this, on-prem implementation. You’d come out, you do a week or two of training. And of course that needed to be a paid services as part of the implementation cost. I think we’re still seeing a lot like enterprise customers still, require or demand those sort of high touch, bespoke, premium feeling training services.
But I don’t necessarily know that it’s where every team is going to go. When they quote unquote, grow up. Yeah,
Dave Derington: [00:32:04] I don’t know. I think this is interesting because it, for me, it almost represents a schism or a break point for your program because part of you lives in this world, the pro of working with pro service.
Hey, now we’re thinking about revenue now. We’re actually formalizing my team’s growing. Cool. This is really helpful because now I’ve got that support because leadership loves to see they’ve got a revenue generating component, but the con for me is that I feel like I tend to get railroaded or really laser focused on, things like onboarding, and that’s not in here is this is for me a philosophical discussion.
And I think one that you need to bring attention to your leadership. So when I report to professional services, I’m thinking revenue, I’m thinking workflow, I’m thinking process and allocation utilization, all that kind of thing. It’s a different world, completely different verbs. The other hand, NCSS CS, I’m thinking about adoption and scale, the proxy metrics associated with what is getting somebody to adopt over a long period of time.
And the plays in that are not just onboarding, but it’s, re-engagement somebody leaves like all this other stuff and like, how do I keep. Evergreen, how do I have new stuff? So it’s, it’s hard. it pulls you into directions and I think you’d need to be aware of that.
Adam Avramescu: [00:33:15] Yeah. for a lot of, for a lot of companies, when they think about professional services, the majority of professional services that they do for a long time are really implementations.
And yes, that can be limiting if you also want to focus on more maturity driving activities. So I think part of. What you need to do. If you’re an education services team reporting into a professional services team is really thinking about what sort of offerings can we drive and provide to our customers who are at a deeper stage of value realization or deeper into their maturity journey.
Okay. And thinking about that early on, and not just thinking about implementations becomes super crucial and tying you back to the broader purpose of customer success. The other thing I would say is that, once you start to really think about. Utilization and we’re delivering services. We have utilization targets.
We have revenue targets as that can really start to take precedence over the work that you’re doing to, enact more scalable work or cross-functional work or things that aren’t paid. So I would also advocate for education teams, reporting into services teams to really think about, delineating billable versus non-billable roles, so that you really do make sure, or at least setting utilization targets that support your team doing.
enough non-billable work that you’re really serving the whole community more broadly, not just driving. Utilization based projects.
Dave Derington: [00:34:29] I love how you say that. that’s really cool. And that’s something maybe we want to do an episode on someday because it’s very hard.
Adam Avramescu: [00:34:36] Absolutely.
Dave Derington: [00:34:37] Let’s do, rapid fire for the last couple, because we want to keep moving.
I’d like to take the marketing if you don’t mind. Cause I think this is
Adam Avramescu: [00:34:44] let’s do it. You report it to marketing.
Dave Derington: [00:34:46] So you reported marketing as well. I have not. No. I, so I want to do a shout out to,
Adam Avramescu: [00:34:50] actually I have. Yeah. I just remember that a long time ago,
Dave Derington: [00:34:54] long time ago, but mine was pretty recent though.
It was Aqua, Dan Cogan. again, really appreciate that opportunity to come in and be a part of the marketing team, which was eyeopening and so exciting to me. really from the bottom of my heart, appreciate this opportunity. Eh, the thing about working in marketing is that it’s very different, fundamentally different from working in any other definitely professional services on the other side of the spectrum, because you’re alive.
You’re. Oh, you’re thinking about customers all the freaking time for one, not like you aren’t in professional services, but it’s. Promotional awareness, branding, all the things that get people excited, professional services is less excited as now we’re actually motivated to do. so things that I liked is that the fact I was really close to product marketing and we’re so close to product marketing.
What we do, we’re a lens or a flavor of product marketing that goes much deeper and like worries about outcomes, outcome, but we’re thinking the same language and product marketing, what we want outcomes. I put a video up on LinkedIn and it showed this new feature that we’ve got and somebody who’s excited.
Now we have the inbound marketing and that goes into sales and it comes back through, but those people are learning. There’s no doubt about that. So now if you couple that this was really strong. If you couple that product marketing with actual education. It’s impactful and very powerful because now some people will actually traverse that and come right over to the educational stuff and go deeper.
And then they go, Oh my gosh, this solves my problem. I’m going to sales. There is no question I’m buying this car. Correct?
Adam Avramescu: [00:36:26] Absolutely. I think that customer education and product marketing are really two peas in a pod as far as roles are concerned.
Dave Derington: [00:36:32] Yeah. So what else do we got that? One’s a quick one.
Adam Avramescu: [00:36:34] Yeah.
Okay. how about product teams? So we definitely see, yeah, we see some, I think increasing numbers of. Customer education teams living within product. And this is coming out of the idea that, for some products really being able to drive a lot of contextual product adoption is important.
And it’s the main type of education that they want to drive. especially for products that don’t necessarily have this huge like enterprise services arm, but they’re really a product focused company. maybe they want to drive a lot of self-service customer learning, living in product a can make a ton of sense.
And in fact, here. your role as a customer educator might almost look like being a growth product manager. Yeah.
Dave Derington: [00:37:14] there is a con there that I could detect that is okay. my partner is a, an Android developer does not like writing documentation. God help us if. They were asked to write training material.
it’s not out of the question, that’s something that, detect, but it’s a good point. there’s a real advantage if you’re really close to the product that you’re, you can make great content because you’re close to the people that are making it.
Adam Avramescu: [00:37:43] Yeah, absolutely. you’re sitting on the front line, so to speak with the developers and the other PM’s who are working on education.
And certainly, I would say, if you. Are pursuing a strategy that is really high on in product education, contextual education, using a lot of the in product tools and patterns. then that might be a great place to sit, but Dave, we’ve talked about a few different thoughts here, but I think you have some final thoughts here to share.
Dave Derington: [00:38:08] Yeah. I’ll make them quick. first off, I think there’s always going to be a challenge trying to figure out where we belong. I’ve talked with CEOs, I’ve talked all kinds of different peoples different, all of you that I’ve met in person. Like where are you at? What do you do? It just depends. It really depends.
It can work anywhere. I just wanted to share a quick story that, I’ll give a shout out to Nick Mehta, the CEO of Gainsight and. don’t be afraid of talking to your CEO either or your executive suite. And because I think being a champion and advocating for education, when you get to the people who understand what your language you’re talking about, and you’re talking above the line below the line, above the line, you’re talking to the CEO and how I can help you scale.
Nick and I talked, we had a 15 minutes skip level one day, which turned into a couple hours. And I was like, I was amazed. he said, you know what, let me make a call. Okay. My schedule is cleared. I really need to learn this. What you’re talking about. This is super exciting, and that is so rewarding because now people realize education is a big part of your company.
I would say ultimately I’d love to see like more, a CLO type position earlier on where we could be across functional and really emphasize that. But overall, if I were to be asked and I’d like to know what you say before we quit, I think CS is the best place to be right away when you start.
Adam Avramescu: [00:39:30] Yeah. Yeah. I think if we start to see more of a move towards the CLO, the chief learning officer, that will probably end up taking us a little bit. I don’t know. It’s a different schema in some ways than where customer education lives today, because typically I think customer education teams are not necessarily doing the hybridized model where you’re responsible for.
Internal enablement and external enablement and partners. I do see some of that. And I think for companies that are pursuing that sort of model, then yeah, maybe eventually that will evolve into a chief learning officer model. But I also, yeah, I don’t know. I think that for most smaller companies, we’re not necessarily going to see education and representation on that level.
And I, I don’t know that we. Need to, for as many people as say that, customer education, will have a Mark of success by reporting directly to the CEO. I like the ambition of that statement. I think I think there would be huge potential in doing that, but, scary to
Dave Derington: [00:40:32] it
Adam Avramescu: [00:40:32] is it is a little scary and I also don’t know that.
it’s more beneficial to have customer education represented independently at that level than to really be part and parcel of a company’s customer success strategy or their marketing strategy, or maybe their product strategy. And so either way, you’re going to work really cross-functionally with those groups anyway.
And yeah, I don’t have a, I don’t have a super interesting perspective on it beyond saying that customer success seems to be the most common. We definitely are seeing more. Up in marketing and product, and I’d be interested to see where those teams go over time.
Dave Derington: [00:41:11] We’ve covered a lot of ground, Adam.
Adam Avramescu: [00:41:13] I’m not sure how to mailbags to 40 minute episodes. So let’s wrap it up. Listeners, if you want to learn more. We have a podcast website@customer.education where you can find show notes and other material on Twitter. I am at after Moscow.
Dave Derington: [00:41:30] And I’m @davederington special. Thanks to our friend, Alan Koto for our amazing theme music.
Thanks again for that.
Adam Avramescu: [00:41:37] Macavitys rainbow on Twitter. And if this helps you out, you can help us out by subscribing and Apple podcasts, overcast, Stitcher, Spotify, the whole shebang, wherever it is, you listen to podcasts. We’d really appreciate if you left us a positive review on Apple podcasts, because that actually helps the most.
It really helps expose our podcast to other people, helps us keep this whole thing going.
Dave Derington: [00:42:00] I do our audience. Thanks for joining us. Go out, educate experiment, and find your people.
Adam Avramescu: [00:42:05] Thanks for listening.