Adam Avramescu: [00:00:00] Hey,
Dave Derington: [00:00:00] Adam. Hey, Dave. Today is an exciting day. Isn’t it? Yeah, sure is. But wait, I forgot. Why is today so
exciting
because we’ve launched our customer education manifesto. Manny Festo. 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. 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
Adam Avramescu: [00:00:35] it to the door of a church?
Dave Derington: [00:00:37] We did not. And those are theses, right? Oh silly me, but seriously, we had a 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. that’s great. I can just click that and read the manifesto.
Oh, it looks like I can sign it too. Cool. 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. Oh, geez.
I better hurry up and sign something tells me you’re already on the list.
Adam Avramescu: [00:01:12] Hi, it’s not like we wrote it.
Dave Derington: [00:01:22] Welcome to CELab, the customer education lab, where we explore how to build customer education programs, experiment with new approaches and exterminate the myths and the really bad advice that’s out there. It stops our growth. Dennis Trax. I am Dave Derington and today I’m joined by a very special guest Rhea, meaning Chapman.
Hello, Maria.
Maria Manning-Chapman: [00:01:42] Hey Dave, how are you?
Dave Derington: [00:01:43] Great. And you’re the VP of education services research at the TSIA. So we’re really thankful to have you, let’s kick this off with some, a little bit of fun. Like we always used to do, we do the international. Day off here. And I picked a couple of relevant days of today.
One is, this is professional speakers day, which that’s relevant. we’ve both done that. And then here’s one. I really the, apparently this is particularly preposterous packaging day.
You know that crazy Amazon box.
I don’t know. I deal with that all the time. Like how do I get into this thing? Oh, no, I didn’t need to return it,
Maria Manning-Chapman: [00:02:26] but you know what I got to say about that? People are really clever with packaging. I got a, A monitor 32 inch monitor. And, obviously comes in this pretty slim box, pull it out.
And I was very intrigued because they had the styrofoam around it to protect it. But then there were all these little compartments in the styrofoam. And the chords were in these cutouts, in the styrofoam and the stand portion. And I thought that’s very clever. Now the problem is don’t try and get all that stuff back in the box because it’s not going to happen because then I had to send it back.
There was a problem and it was like, Oh my God. How did they get everything in the box? Because I can’t do it.
Dave Derington: [00:03:14] Yeah. How do they do it? I don’t know. That is it’s it’s curious. I wonder what it’s like working at those companies designing.
Maria Manning-Chapman: [00:03:21] Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
Dave Derington: [00:03:24] And then you have to teach the people how to package it.
speaking of teaching. let’s get into this a little bit. Maria, I was as glad to be able to meet you for the first time in person at Skilljar connect last year. that was fun. We didn’t have too much time, but we had a good introduction. So now we’re here and we’re really thankful to have you here today.
So I wanted to lead in because of a few things we’ve been listening to you and we’re, I was on your podcast on Wednesday, which was fabulous. Earlier this year you released, I think it was February, your state of education services, 2020, which we devoted an entire episode to episode 38, which will have links in the show notes.
and we want to get deeper. We really want to position you to talk to our audience. So can you. Just tell us a little bit about yourself, just real briefly, your background, how you got here. and anything interesting before we get into the formal podcast. Yeah.
Maria Manning-Chapman: [00:04:21] I am not one of those people in life who, I knew at the age of 10, I was going to be a doctor.
So I haven’t had that kind of logical progression in my career. But what I can say is it has always been education-related although I degree. my background is in clinical psychology and counseling. and then in between the bachelor’s and the master’s, I got a teaching credential, so I actually started, teaching in elementary school and I was single living in the Bay area at the time.
And after three years said to myself, gee, I want to survive. I need a real job. And clearly anybody who’s. Come out of academia knows, there’s a lot more money to be made in high tech was just put it that way. So I went down that road and just said to myself, okay, what skills do I have that are transferable?
I was teaching sixth graders and I thought, okay, teaching sixth graders and teaching adults, not all that different. So let me try and make that transition into the high tech. World, which I was able to successfully do and started my career at a semiconductor company, doing technical training, which to me is laughable it’s seriously.
anybody who knows me knows that I am like the high-tech person in the universe. I always say, give me paper and pencil. Cause I know how that works. And, and I was doing technical training and, in a fab. So I’d loved it because I learned everything there was to know about, how to manufacture a semiconductor.
So it was fascinating to me. And so I was, Technical trainer for about six months. And then I was asked to manage, the, internal technical training organization. And so did that for a few years, then moved to a mainframe company where I was also doing training, in their manufacturing organization.
at that time that was all internal training. And then in. Geez. I have to think. 1990s six, I think it was, I went to a company called software and that was when I made the segue to customer facing training. So since 1996, I’ve been doing hands-on. Customer. I shouldn’t say this whole time from 1996 until I started the job at TSI, which was 10 years ago.
So from 1996 to 2010, I was managing, customer facing education organizations. So I managed delivering managed content development, managed the entire education function. And then about 10 years ago, a friend of mine. I said, Hey, there’s this company called TSIA, and they’re looking for somebody.
And so I talked to Thomas law, a lot of folks who’ve been to our conference. conferences are familiar with Thomas, interviewed and here I am, 10 years later, that’s.
Dave Derington: [00:07:35] I really liked this story because I think like many of us who, how should I say we fall into this world where, but I think if you were to actually set out Maria to do, to get to where you are today, and same goes for me, Adam, many of the people that we’re in are in this educational world.
There are a lot of them like us that just gravitate to it. it ends up being a secret calling. I share a story that I had as, I had a neighbor who became really close friends. She was a elementary school teacher. And actually, I correct that she’s a middle school teacher. And she said, Dave, you found your inner teacher, your, you found your inner teacher, you found your spirit and usually happens.
Is that in you?
Maria Manning-Chapman: [00:08:16] Yes,
Dave Derington: [00:08:17] you can. This. And
Maria Manning-Chapman: [00:08:19] that is absolutely the truth. And for me personally, no, I’m very curious by nature. And because of that, I love to learn. And so I think that is what is inside of me is I love to learn it because I love to learn. I want to help others learn. And although my job at TSI, I’m not quote unquote, training in the practical sense by virtue of doing research, having conversations with you and other people in.
the education world I’m constantly educating myself, and that’s my data that I turn into, reports and webinars and blogs and things that get communicated back out, to the education industry. And I think it’s that natural inclination. I have to always want to learn more that after 10 years has kept this job interesting for me.
Yeah,
Dave Derington: [00:09:16] you stay at someplace for 10 years and it’s still interesting. That’s phenomenal that is your,
Maria Manning-Chapman: [00:09:22] I am I? And I know that for sure.
Dave Derington: [00:09:25] we should all be so lucky. you’ve said a lot right in here that I think really frames up our discussion today in, and let me do a little bit more exposition here and say.
For our community for our listeners. If you’re a listener out there right now, what CELab is and is very much like what you’ve said for you and for the TSIA we’re learning, we don’t know everything we’re trying to connect. we’re a network of people, but where we’re really interested in talking with you is.
customer education is both new and not new. It has elements that draw from all of these disciplines. Like you mentioned, you’ve had background in psychology and education. You worked at a semiconductor fab and all these different things were called into this motion of customer education where it’s new is that you’re often coming out of customer success.
Now we’re trying to get to scale. We’re trying to help our company grow up and we’re ultimately you evolving into what. I think is that educational services entity. And, Adam and I have had this very strange parallel career over the past five or so years where we started off at a very small entity, actually, it was pretty middle-size.
And then we both came to smaller companies and then we both came to bigger companies that are transitioning to grow up. Right fast. That is such an interesting thing. And I talk to people all the time that are, what do I do? How do I start? I was a CSM and now I am I’m training people. Or I was just an instructional designer that only focused on what people gave me with and built the script.
So I don’t know about all this other stuff and how to connect and how to learn and how to grow. So that kind of frames up where we’re at, where we’re a little niche down, but we’re growing to where we’re growing into the market that you talk to. And I think you’re reaching back out to us and we’ll just meet in the middle.
So that’s what I wanted to do today is let’s connect
and really dive into some of this. I want to understand our audience wants to understand more about what is it at educational services and what is it we need to know as we grow up and become, big educational services folks or not.
No. what can we learn from that?
Maria Manning-Chapman: [00:11:36] What I would see as a starting point is the mindset. And I think this is, what is missing in younger, the younger companies or younger education organizations and how they think about education. And what I would say is whether it’s, you’re just forming your education or whose nation you’ve been around for a couple years, you’ve been around five, 10 years.
I don’t think it matters. I think the focus is. How do I run this like a business? Yes. And you don’t have to be revenue generating, run it like a business. And I would say that is one of the, weak points that I see when I talk to members who are at companies that are again, have newly formed or are fairly young education organizations.
They tend to operate as cost centers. And because they operate as cost centers, the people running the organization are not really thinking about how they need to run it as a business. and it’s so important because you have to think about things like, how am I going to go to market? No, how am I going to get this product in front of my customers?
How am I going to keep them coming back and consuming more? How am I going to progress them from, this little nugget of learning to this big entire program or class of learning, how am I going to get them to get a certification? And you have to approach that by thinking of it as a business and not just, Oh, I’m creating content.
And people are getting trained.
Dave Derington: [00:13:21] Yes. And that is fundamentally a radical transition. And I felt it in myself. we’re talking around our first point here, so we’re just organically going to this. So we’re talking about really understanding what it means to run a business via an educational services team or department, or what have it, but we grow up not having to worry about those right away when I come into an organization have, so the first thing I do is I do the lay of the land.
I’m like, what have I got to work with? in pretty much every case where I’ve been, it’s been. Somebody had been in there and they put some stuff together. There was no packages. There’s no cost there’s no anything. And then my team’s looking at me like I’m drowning in training, or I have no place to start.
So what we’ve organically. Learned. And now we’ve structured into, we created a manifesto to talk about how we do it in our little circles. You know how we’re growing. there’s a strategy here. And I think this is the missing piece. This is the Holy grail. When people always ask me about how do I, and we’re going to talk about this in our next point.
w we have this maturity continuum, we’re getting to revenue, but then some of it’s not, and that’s where a lot of confusion is, but w let’s start talking about that maturity continuum, like you say, look, can you talk about, a little bit more about, the members you have, where they’re at?
What kind of information do you have? I think you’ve got some statistics with some numbers here because you are research. But what can you tell us about, your membership and like more, a little bit more about your business model perspective?
Maria Manning-Chapman: [00:15:01] Yeah, it has changed. I will say that when I go back, like I said, I been now 10 years with a TSIA.
We have done something since that time. so just to back step a little bit, when I first joined the company, there was no education services, research practice. it was nothing. So I then had to build it up from the nothing. And we currently have about 85 ish, 90 ish. Education services members.
so yeah. Our larger disciplines, like support, and then their professional services. If we look by size support has 200 and something members and PS has 180 members. but I’m in that higher grouping. So I’m at least proud of that. One of the things that we did and not just me, every research practice area at TSIA has a benchmark.
So the great news about the benchmark, there’s about 130 questions. We, encourage every new member to participate in the survey and folks who have been members for years and years, we encourage them about every two years to redo the benchmark. But from that, I have lots of data. And my point about bringing that up is.
When I look at the data 10 years ago to the data. Now, there is a shift. And I would say that shift is largely based on X as a service companies and the pendulum’s one way. And I know the pendulum’s coming back and here’s where it’s going and where I think it’s going to be coming back. So when I started doing the benchmark 10 years ago, I would say, 65 to 70% of my numbers were revenue generating.
And when I say revenue generating, it means, your revenue margin and profit positive. And then the remaining percentages were, a handful were breaky. Then another handful were cost centers over the last two or three years. I have seen that shift a bit. And it’s because my membership now is, regularly X as a service business model companies, clearly their business model is different.
And one of the things that is different is that an X as a service company tends to go out the door with free training, which means by default, most not all, but most of. Those member companies have, education services, organizations that are cost centers. So the way the numbers are breaking out currently is about 20% of my membership is, operating as a cost center.
20% are breaking in and about 55 ish percent are revenue generating. And then the leftover percentage is, a little bit of this and a little bit of that. I think, and here’s the other side of that coin though, most people who are in breakeven, the conversations I’m having with them are how to move to being revenue, margin, profit, positive.
Most of those who are cost centers are asking, okay, how do I at least move to break even? So there is that natural progression to move from a cost center to break even, and then eventually into revenue generating.
Dave Derington: [00:18:38] let me ask you a question Rio then again, around this, with your cohort of people that you work with on a day-to-day basis, where would you say on average that company size.
would orbit around, are a hundred, two 50, 500,000 larger? we’re where is your demographic core at? That’s a
Maria Manning-Chapman: [00:19:00] great question. I have that data in the benchmark. I don’t know it off the top of my head because we that’s. One of the questions we ask is how large is the company that he worked for.
if I were, and the way we break it out into benchmark is we combine small, medium and large, and a large company is defined as. 5,000 or more employees. So not looking at the eyes of the education organization specifically, but the size of the company. And I’d say it’s about 60, 40. So probably 40% of my population is in that more than 5,000 employees category.
And. the other 60% is somewhere in that small medium bracket. And then by default, when we look at the business model, cost center break even, or, revenue generating, there is some correlation to size. Most large companies have large education organizations, and those do tend to be revenue generating.
But it doesn’t necessarily mean because there’s a small company with a small education organization that they’re a cost center. So I have some percentage obviously that are costs, but some of those smaller, newer companies. Are in the revenue side and I’m going to get on my soap box here for just one minute, because I’m all about the revenue and, and I don’t say that because I’m a money grubbing person, but here’s the analogy that I use when I have conversations with people.
Because one of the conversations I often have with new members that are coming from X as a service companies is. What should we do? Should we monetize? Should we be free, et cetera. And the analogy I always use in this conversation is, think back to those days when we were all teenagers.
Yeah, you had to go to mom and dad asked for money to go to the movies. And then think about the day when you got that first job at the pizza parlor. McDonald’s wherever it was. And now you had money in your pocket. You were self-funding. You didn’t have to go to mom and dad anymore to ask for the money you had the money.
And for me personally, that is the number one reason to be revenue generating. Because again, if you’re thinking of education as a business, your job is to always grow the business. You need money, you have to have money to invest in your growth. And the problem when you’re a cost center is you’re back to being a teenager.
you have to go with hat in hand and you have to, circulate through the company, trying to find somebody who wants to put some money in the hat for you so that you can go grow your business. And so that’s why I’m just a huge advocate of being revenue generating. You want to be able to fund your own growth.
If you want a new platform, if you want to be able to scale, you want to build a new offer. You want to go to market through, automation or different programs. You can’t do that. If you don’t have the money to invest in yourself. So that’s the one thing on the revenue side. And then the other is, the other half of my soap box is what I call the fallacy of free training.
And the conversations that I have with people are they believe that. Charging for education is a barrier. And if we charge for education, then they’re not going to get trained. So then they’re not going to use the product which was then we’re not going to help drive product adoption. And the point I always make to people is free training is no guarantee of consumption and whether you’re free based or you’re, fee-based the pivotal point in that is you have to have a consumption strategy.
Dave Derington: [00:23:13] Right.
Maria Manning-Chapman: [00:23:14] And if you don’t, whether you’re free or fee, you’re, you can have training till the cows come out. If you’re not getting people to consume it, then it really doesn’t matter. so that’s why I always say to folks it’s not an, a free or conversation, it’s the free and. Conversation because in a well-run organization running it like a business, it’s a strategy that combines those two things to successfully get training into the hands of your customers and to keep them engaged so that they use your product more, et cetera.
Dave Derington: [00:23:56] Wow. I absolutely love these analogies and they’re really resonate with me personally right now and professionally. And I think with our audience and let me take a moment to respond, because I think both of these points you made about number one, I love the teenager analogy. I absolutely think it’s appropriate to us because.
where I come from, I’m coming out of a customer success organization in a very small business. Who’s growing rapidly and I was there. I was there. I’m suffering. I have. And at one company, I was just me, I was a, a Gainsight first and I had a team of three people. And then as I was transitioning away and it was leaving the company, I would get more and more.
and I’m like, wow, this was really cool. I can do a whole lot more, but we didn’t have paid programs. So it was very hard to scale and grow my team. And I was like, Hey, I need more help. I need more help. but the conversation of fi hadn’t been had yet, and we weren’t quite ready. At that, in that environment and every environment’s very different.
And then I went to a company called Azuqua and there were a very small 50 people company, startup tech, hard tech, and. it was, I wanted to experiment with that role and it was 100% of freemium model or free model. And, but the goal that I was there for was not necessarily the same because we knew we were aiming to sell the company.
So my goal was to get everything out, get everything down, make it such that the product was easier to learn. And then we were off, the company got sold and acquired and I transitioned to outreach, but now. here’s where I’m at now. And this is why I really appreciate talking to you. And I think this free and fee, right?
I would say that as a mantra, everybody on the line. So vocalize it, say it out loud, scream it’s both C and free. It’s both. let me talk about another story I have here, because like you, I’ve had a very strange career. That’s led me here. And at one point in my life, I had a passion. For running events.
And those events were a video game tournaments, which ended up going pretty up market. So it was really weird, but I have, I liked connecting and building things, which is common theme. I’m sure you’re there too. whether it’s education or games, here’s the problem that I had there. I had to learn very early on about the.
You need to charge a price. And I was listening to your podcast or your I’m sorry, your webinar last night that you had on Wednesday and you were talking a lot about, how am I going to be charging for these programs? And you’re getting to this premium concept and, Oh my gosh, I had this.
Thinking any of you who are listening right now, really just need to sit down and take a pen and paper and just think about where you want to be with this company I had. And again, this is not education, but it was an education for me. I had events where, okay, I have a, I’m doing this on my own. I have a very small business.
It’s a hobby business. I have a full-time job elsewhere. I’m trying to make everything. I’m trying to do this in a way that we continue to make a little bit of money to be able to pay the bills and to grow. but if, again, I’m working with largely teenagers, these are the kids that want to come and play Counter-Strike Overwatch, whatever, and they don’t have a lot of money.
But if I found that if I didn’t charge anything and I made a free event and I had sponsors pay for the event, then I had low attendance. Because they’re like, eh, I don’t really feel like going today. I don’t have any skin in the game, so I’m not going to go. eh, but then when I pivoted that and I said, now I introduced a hierarchical model where I have an early bird special.
So I introduced the events and I say, Hey, we’re going to have this event. If you sign up now within the next month you get into this price, then it goes up to this price. But then it’s this price. we have a limited refund policy that lasts up to a month prior to the event. And after that, you have to talk to me and you have to have a really good reason because I’m not going to give you a refund.
And that completely changed everything for me. I no longer had to beg sponsors and the sponsors were like Invidia and, like EA games, like all these big gaming companies, even the U S army wanted to give money to us, which was surprising. But they would say here’s a check for $5,000. And at the end I was getting thousands of dollars to give away for prizes and to support the infrastructure, the event.
But I was also making a decent amount of money. we called that gate, like what revenue do you take in for admission? which I just used and put back to have fun stuff, right? Sponsors paid the bill. The participants got the benefit of that. So that was a life lesson for me that I’m coming to realize.
What you’re saying, and this, fi and free mantra is important to us as customer educators now, because yes, we’re growing up fast. And what we need to do is really sit down and think about, okay, so let me talk about me real briefly. My team, I have. A group of five trainers and they do live and virtual events.
Like we will be traveling a lot and we have traveled lots. We can’t. And then I have three instructional designers and B between them, the social designers are really my cost center, but the trainers are not right. And we have been pivoting away from giving away free training too. Fee-based training and unblocking, watching your pockets go.
Yes. Yes. Yes. That, because that’s expensive. That’s, it’s heavy when you take somebody and you want, like you were saying on your webinar, if anybody has had to list too, I think you could still get the recording. It’s really good that you want to think about. Okay. it’s expensive to send a human being somewhere and have them be in front of you for an entire day or two and interact and do all the things and prepare and follow up.
That’s a lot of work.
Maria Manning-Chapman: [00:29:44] Yeah, absolutely.
Dave Derington: [00:29:45] It’s a lot of work
Maria Manning-Chapman: [00:29:47] and, and for me again, where I think about is there’s also value in that and the experience for the learner. So why shouldn’t that come. With a fee ending to me, it just makes sense. You’re getting an instructor, you’re getting somebody who’s knowledge is at your disposal.
So going back to that webinar, that’s why I think that in that category of premium, and when you look at offers and I would say generically, this about most education organization. They’re good at creating content. They’re not good at creating offers. And I would have folks to sit back and think about it because content is not your offer.
And so when you think of your offers to think of them in three categories, you can have a free offer, a standard offer, and then a premium offer. And I want to take just a minute to define free because I know people are probably thinking, what sort of defined free is free? let me tell you the distinction I make and the, and it’s an important one because it has everything to do with strategy.
So when you think of free I’m running my education business, and I say, okay, I’m going to create this five minute video for free. That means I have intentionally. And that’s the important word intent. The my intention is that this video will be a free video, Or it could be, you have a subscription offer and you say, okay, on this offer, it’s largely fee-based however, I’m going to offer a 30 day free trial.
And then on day 31, we want to convert them to a fee-based offer. And, or it two week trial with, whatever the time span. So those things I have done within tax. So this next thing I’m going to describe is not free training. And what this scenario is you have training. It has a price tag and your sales guy discounts it a hundred percent.
That for me is not free training because number one intent, the intent was it has a price tape and its sales guy’s giving it away and there was no strategy there. There’s zero strategy. Whereas when I consciously say, okay, I’m going to have this offer or, this a webinar or this. Piece of video and I am consciously saying it’s free.
Then I can build my free, the strategy around that. I can’t build a strategy around salespeople. We’re just giving my product away.
Dave Derington: [00:32:48] we haven’t had that happened to us. Haven’t we,
Maria Manning-Chapman: [00:32:52] in case, people are thinking, Oh, my guys, my salespeople are giving it away for free. So that counts.
No, it doesn’t because it is not part of the strategy.
Dave Derington: [00:33:03] this is gospel. And it’s part of the thinking that I think a lot of us in customer education now actually need to be more rigorous and do, and sit down and think about strategically, where am I going? Where am I going to look like? Not just next month, but six months a year out.
And I’ve done this several times. Now. I’ve had to think about with intentionality, where are we headed? How are we going to build these packages? And it is exceptionally hard. Yes, it is really hard. let me use this as a point to transition though, because I think we’re on the precipice of now talking about, again, we’re talking about an evolving maturing organization, maybe you started when the company was 50 and you’re an X, a S company.
whatever you’re selling as a service and you’re growing fast. I don’t know what outreach. people talk about the airplane, building an airplane in flight. We’re building a rocket ship in flight. Excuse me, it’s so fast. So we’re bringing things together, but fortunately we have a great team and people are thinking this way, we’ve been taught having this talk.
Now here’s the thing that comes up to me. today is, I’ve been in a couple of organizations where I first reported in. I started to customer success, formally porting the SVP of customer success. It’s palpably different from being in a services org where I live now, and that happened a couple of times.
And now what comes up is this question where. Okay, Dave, today, we need to talk about what is the ROI? What is the return on investment for your team? Okay. That th that question didn’t come up six months ago. Now it’s coming up and I’m like, Oh goodness. fortunately I have data. I have a lot of it. And I have that correlated with Salesforce accounts, all these activities.
I have a lot of information that I can learn, but. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on how we can demonstrate that ROI right in, and this is packed inside that free and free discussion we’ve already been having. how do we really express to the value of our organizations, what we’re doing?
Maria Manning-Chapman: [00:35:12] Yeah. so let me go back to the revenue for just a second, because I would say historically education. Organizations tried to validate their worth based on the fact that they were generating revenue. and while, as we’ve talked about, that’s definitely a good thing you want to be self-funding when you look at numbers.
So as an example, if we look at product revenue generated, so not everything in the company that generates revenue, but just. Product. If you look at that dollar amount and you then look at those reg revenue generating education organizations, the revenue contribution to the bottom line from education is about 2% of product.
The reality is even when you’re revenue generating. So again, you want to be revenue generating to self fund, but it is not how you’re going to prove your worth to the company. and this is true, whether you’re an X as a service company on premise or something in between, and most companies are somewhere in between now, But you have to start looking at is what are the metrics that are important to your company? And I’m going to guess for most people, it’s going to be growth in ARR. So annual recurring revenue spot on. You’re going to be things like customer retention. Product subscription, renewal rates, driving down, call volume into support because support costs a lot of money improved C-SAT or NPS, speaking to the customer success side of the business, et cetera.
So it starts by going to your executive level management and asking, what are the top two metrics you have top three, whatever it is. And you may already know that. So let’s just say for the sake of discussion, it’s, product subscription renewals and C-SAT NPS customer sat in general.
So if those were the metrics then where you have to start is looking at. The trained population versus the untrained. And that’s a continuum. You might have somebody who took the onboarding training and it hasn’t. Touch training sense as compared to someone or a company where they’ve been diligent, they followed the learning path.
They progressed from this to the next they’ve gotten a certification, et cetera. so it’s a continuum for sure. So I’m just going to generically say trained untrained or moderately trained.
Dave Derington: [00:37:58] Okay.
Maria Manning-Chapman: [00:37:59] Let’s separate them into a hundred. We have a hundred over here who are companies where people have been trained.
We have a hundred over here who they’ve done very little or nothing. And then look at the data. So then you have access to Salesforce. This is where it does help to have some integration with other corporate systems. if you’re not integrated, then go to whoever, can get you the data and look to see, okay, who’s renewed in the last year.
Of this list of 100 people that I have that did a lot of training. How does that look for that company in terms of the renewal? Did they renew, did they not renew, et cetera? And then look again at that same data information. For the untrained. And I’m guessing you’re going to see that companies that have not invested in training, maybe just did the onboarding haven’t touched anything or done much sense.
That the renewal rates are lower. Now it doesn’t mean that’s all because of training. And that’s where people will say, we can’t say that it was just because of training. And it’s no, you can’t, but you can’t say training had an impact because that it did, based on the fact that there’s a bloop of people who had no training and the renewal rates are lower or are different or aren’t as good or whatever.
So the reality is. Education is probably never going to have the resources to be able to get rid of all the noise and to control for all of the variables. So what I see is inertia people say, Oh, causation versus correlation. who cares? Correlation is enough for me, it’s better than nothing.
If I can show that an account that’s trained has a greater likelihood of subscription renewal than a company that isn’t trained. But that works for me. And then you have to be able to position that with ex executive management to say, Hey, we had a hundred here and a hundred here. And in the situation where people trained the renewal rate was 90%.
And in this situation where people were trained, the renewal rate was, 80% then needs.
Dave Derington: [00:40:23] It does
Maria Manning-Chapman: [00:40:25] biggest problem. I see across the board, big, medium. Small old education organization, new education organizations is the lack of the collection of that kind of data. And then doing the necessary analysis to show some of those correlations.
I’d say that’s the number one failing. Most of my education organization, they collect data. Don’t get me wrong. Most of its operational data though. It’s not what I call it. Impact data.
Dave Derington: [00:40:59] Yeah. if there are some and hear that, first of all, Maria, you and Adam in particular, Adam was talking a lot about this causation for correlation versus causation thing.
w we’ve talked very much around this whole thing. This, what you’ve packaged up in this few moments of discussing their ROI is our call to action. I think that. This is insanely difficult on one level. If you were to go, I had a talk with a friend of mine, who’s a data scientist. And he said he actually, I gave him my data, set all of our data from our LMS and other inputs.
what am I trainers do? What’s my C-SAT, what’s all this stuff. What are the, all my data sources? And I gave them to him and he goes, Oh my gosh. I’m so it’s like a kidney gain up. Oh, this is so great. Oh my gosh, I could do so much with this. And he said to me, we talked specifically about correlation versus causation and, Adam’s a, Who cares if I could show there’s a light correlation, there’s any kind of correlation training versus not it’s as simple as I show a dashboard in Tableau or whatever I use that says these accounts had trading.
These accounts did not. Here is the time to deliver first value. You’re talking to first value is a term we often use the success here is ARR, of one versus another. You correlate all these things where you put all these things out there and even without de coupling in and out the noise, you can say that’s a big difference.
Maria Manning-Chapman: [00:42:28] Absolutely. and I’m in 100% agreement. And I think that folks just need to take that first step. And I know R to do, I know getting the data, is challenging and systems are challenging. I know, especially on the LMS side, I think LMS has, are improving in terms of getting better data.
but I w what I want to say to education organizations is don’t let that be the excuse anymore, because if you truly want to be able to impart. Value that’s where it is. Your company is going to care. If they know you’re helping to drive product adoption, you’re helping to drive ARR, any of those variables.
And then, th that’s, if you’re looking for funding, that’s a great place to start. If you’re in a company, that’s saying, Oh, you’re, we’re not going to fund you or we’re going to give you limited funding or et cetera, or you want to make the business case to say, Hey, we want to move to revenue, generating new cause to do that.
You still need an investment somewhere. That’s a great way to do it. This is what we’re returning to you as a company, that’s worth something
Dave Derington: [00:43:44] that is worth a lot. And I have to say that you’re spot on saying that this is hard. It takes a lot to do. And in fact, at Gainsight, at Azuqua, at outreach, all the last three opportunities, where I worked it, that was one of the first things I did.
I’m a data person at heart. I’ve got degrees in. Computational chemistry. So I love data and numbers and I love crunching numbers. That’s rare. I know. but at the same point then I think, when I entered into my last position, I said, where’s all of our telemetry. That’s the big word. where’s the product adoption data.
Where’s my LMS data. Are these in my data warehouse. Can I get to them? Can I run reports off of those and what other platform? And I’ve finally done that, but it took me. Half a year. And that was not just because, and because it was very complicated because there’s a backlog, how do we do it? What are all the pieces?
So one big portion of your job to get to ROI is start today. Start now, get everything connected and then you can start measuring and showing that. And it’s exciting because I’ll tell you a little story early on. I went to actually, th this whole conversation we’re having now is what got me passionate about customer education and getting to the numbers Gainsight.
I did it generated some dashboards. Adam worked on a platform and Optimizely one of, and that’s why we got together about this. There’s a product in here, a way to say. Connect to Salesforce connect to this connect to your LMS. These are the proxy metrics we care about. and this is the shouldn’t be so hard, but it is because integrating all that data is the challenge.
Maria Manning-Chapman: [00:45:20] I’ll tell you, I, this is another thing I always say to members, the one job position that you need to put. On your list, a data analyst, because it’s a full-time job. It’s not a part-time job. And yeah. And you probably know from the amount of time that you spent doing what you did at Gainsight and in other companies, it totally needs to be someone’s full-time job and someone who likes data, because what’s interesting is even though I’m in a research job and I deal with data all the time.
I’m not inherently a data person. it’s not my thing. I understand the value of data though, because it’s so much nicer when I can go in with data versus an opinion and, So from a head count. So anyone out there who’s listening and thinking about, okay, I need to grow my education organization and I need three instructors and five of these.
And two of those, please add to your list because it’s, to me essential, at and becoming ever more essential as more companies move to X as a service business
Dave Derington: [00:46:33] models. I’m smiling so big right now because this conversation I have all the time. And in fact, I primed the pump a little bit myself because I know enough about Tableau and data analysis where I say, I had on my data sources and my, manager was asking me, can you run some numbers?
And they go, yeah. I took that opportunity to actually craft some dashboards that I can continue to use rather than do it once in Excel.
Maria Manning-Chapman: [00:46:58] And
Dave Derington: [00:46:59] folks are like, Oh my gosh, that’s interesting. And I go, yeah, this is why I can really use help from an analyst right now. and honestly, I’m not complaining, that’s something I know how to do.
So I, I do it myself, but I that’s resonant with me and it should be from everyone, even somebody part-time what I usually do is say, okay, here’s the structure of the things. The fields I’ve got, this is the data sources is the stuff I need to get. This is what I’m driving to. And I show a picture of.
this dashboard and this report, and like things who are our top accounts consuming training, who are abusers of live training, who are the people that might be having more than they should. All these questions. You should be able to look in your, business informatics platform and be able to extract instantly.
And then you do that with intention and then say, these are the things that I care about most, and this is what drives ROI. And before long you start getting this. I think start become more reasonable and easier to do because you have the resources, like I’ve been able to use that data to go to my management and say, you know what?
My, I, it’s not just hyperbole now. I’m not just saying, Oh yeah, I need more help. I know my trainers between this time and this time have done X amount of training and that’s ridiculous. They’re exhausted. They’re tired. it’s going up and look as a trend line. There’s this is over a year. Oh yeah.
We’re getting you some more people. Thank you. It was a very easy discussion.
Maria Manning-Chapman: [00:48:21] Yeah, absolutely. And that’s why I say data versus opinion. you have something tangible to be able to put in front of people to, build your business case. Yeah,
Dave Derington: [00:48:34] it’s a, okay. So I think we beat that one up ROI is important.
we both know it. We’re in lockstep here. So if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to the community and we’ll talk more, but let’s wrap up with hopefully an easy one and this should be light. I’m just really curious and we don’t hold the to anything. About where we’re headed, as I’ve listened to, I’ve read your report.
And that came out earlier this year, I was on your webinar just the other day. And you’re doing really great work with research to show where we are and what the landscape of our world is and how it’s shifting and changing over time. Particularly with COVID that’s not going away. I’m just curious.
This is of course speculation. What do you think. 2021, where the rest of this year in 2020 is going to bring, are we going to be seeing more virtual instructor, led motions, less travel, something new that we haven’t ever thought about? what’s your thoughts?
Maria Manning-Chapman: [00:49:30] Yeah. You know that question I’m asked probably.
at least weekly, what’s the future gonna launch? We don’t know. But, a survey that Thomas, who I mentioned earlier that he did, Oh, like in the last few weeks, asked. At the company level. So not specific to education services, but at the broader company level. what do you think the future is for your workforce?
And, the projection that came out of that data was that companies are like us right now speculating that about 60 to 70% of the workforce will remain remote.
Dave Derington: [00:50:17] So
Maria Manning-Chapman: [00:50:17] if we use that kind of as a basis, then I think, yes, most certainly the pivot is towards all things virtual. I think personally what I would like to see is more of a blended learning.
again, I see a lot of oars versus ans so what I mean by that is. Look at here’s content, step-by-step how to basic kind of content. That could be the online component of your course, but then you blend in the virtual instructor led so that they get access to an instructor and they have the opportunity for hands-on lab work.
So that it’s not the
Dave Derington: [00:51:09] same.
Maria Manning-Chapman: [00:51:09] We’ll see. That’s where you start looking at it and you say, okay, if it’s online only that would be a standard offer. If I have online and I’m going to give them a lab environment and I’m going to give them an instructor, then you’re right. Maybe that’s not premium plus, but you’re moving in that premium direction.
But you start thinking about how to tear it. and that it’s a bit of both because I’m. A firm believer of don’t underestimate the power of the human in learning. And I see that all the time and it’s evident in people’s preference as much as we want to push them to online learning. And we want to push them to the virtual environment.
The reality is face-to-face either onsite or in a classroom and tell, mid March of this year has always been. the number one option. And now out of necessity, folks are gravitating to virtual, which is good because I think this is a bit of a try. It you’ll like it. Scenario folks, think, Oh, if I can go to a classroom and just do that, what I want to do it virtually, now that they’ve done it’s Oh, the example you gave at the beginning, people just.
There were people there the first day, and then they just say, why am I here? I can just do this thing virtually. And so I, I think. It will be a blend. I believe the default, four classroom will be the virtual instructor led environment. And that’s based on the data. When we look at what folks chose to do, for example, when they had been registered in an instructor like course, and given the option of converting that, classroom registration to a virtual.
instructor led delivery or the same course offered online. The reversion rate was much higher to the virtual. So I think anything and everything folks can do to optimize that virtual experience, think about what do you need to do to make that the best experience possible? I certainly think, that will be.
Part of the future. And I do think the other part is moving anything that is that face-to-face, I can touch you see you experience into that premium category. And then those companies that are interested in that, can take advantage of it if they’re, if they don’t want to, they can pay less than and, have the virtual experience.
and I think it’s really about getting creative. This is where I think it goes back to packaging. our packaging discussion at the very beginning for international packaging day or whatever the category was on international packaging day, I would have everybody in this call think about packaging.
It is something that I think is so overlooked. and I think in the future, that’s what folks need to do. That’s where you can get creative. And, on the webinar that I did a couple of days ago, I talked about, the whole supersize me approach.
Dave Derington: [00:54:21] Yeah. I love that story.
Maria Manning-Chapman: [00:54:22] That’s think of that. What can you do to add value to your offers?
what things can you swizzle and mixed together in a way that you haven’t before? Because your trying to. get the attention of your customers. You want them to come to the training, so you have to make that interesting. And it can’t be just, I have good content. I have good instructors.
Everybody says that. I think that’s part of the future as well. Is. Is okay. I have this set number of things to do work with because budgets are tight, but what can I do with them? That’s neat or different so that I can create a new thing, And that’s one of the things that, Thomas, when he does briefings on the subject.
when you look back to the financial crisis in 2008, the people who came out of that successfully were the people who said I’m investing in, not I’m just going to sit here and wait and see what happens. So what I say to folks is clearly nobody knows exactly what’s going to happen. But think about what you want to have happen.
What behavior do you want to see from your customers? Do you want them to go to virtual training more? maybe it’s augmented reality or AR looking at how you can use virtual reality in your training. I do have some people who are moving that direction or even AI. how can I take AI to create a custom learning path?
So I think those things and leveraging technology, is definitely, gonna continue and everything virtual for sure will continue to be, over the next six months to a year, for sure.
Dave Derington: [00:56:15] Oh, I love this. I wonder to wrap this up because we’re actually getting to the point where we should wrap up.
The creativity thought that you had, so this is something. And let me connect some dots. It was a little pressure that we were talking about. The, the packaging day thing. It didn’t really think about that or connect the dots, but I’m glad you did because it’s true. We need to extrude to this fabric of education.
That is not just a typical motion, right? here’s what I object to, even with my own work. And I’m being self-critical that is sometimes really. Pouring. and I can’t some, the first time I built something, it might be that way. I try not to make it that way, but necessarily I have to get it all out.
The first time I have to build this up because I’m pulling things out of people’s heads and particularly in the SAS world. People are running blind. CSMs are training, everybody’s doing training, but it’s not organized or structured. It’s just happening. So my job is to gather that and then channel that energy, bring those voices in, build a program up and make it be interesting and exciting and build that into the fabric or the DNA of the company so that it doesn’t feel intractable or too hard or boring, or, whatever.
So speaking to that, there are other things that I think we as educators should all start doing. I’m bored and burned out with zoom. I’m going to admit that it’s too much. I do it every day. I’m like, Oh, another zoom call. hopefully as we start to open things up, we should start thinking about different kinds of educational motions when, but they don’t really, we don’t have many verbs.
something that we experimented with once was Twitch. So Twitch is a gamer platform, but it’s not as much anymore. And, but the thing about it is that I would get on Twitch at my last position and just sit there and do training live and I would make mistakes live and I’d struggle with things live.
I was very transparent and open. It was very humility, humbling, I should say, not humiliating. but people were actively helping me and talking and interacting with the all the way through. And it was emotional. I never tried before in the call to action there is try new things and experiment.
That’s what we’re all about at CELab. We’re a laboratory, I, I’m a scientist, I think like that, but there’s other things you could do. For example, one of my recent jobs, we went and we were very strong partners with Tableau. So we did a, a game jam, a jam where we got together and we tried to solve hard problems together in a whole workshop day, but that necessarily.
You’re required to prerequisite was that people go through some of our training and, but then we got together and we did cool things. And the learning that came out of that was fundamentally different and much more engaging and fun. And then, in spirit of today’s international beer day, we went out and had a drink and talked about the experience and it was sticky.
And. and we bonded. And now that now then you also don’t think as much about community. So do you use your community or have a network of people where you have user meetups and groups? education is not all just about the traditional motions. It could be all these other things. And like you go to an event.
I have people always talk. Can you do training and event? I’m going to do training at event. That’s the same as the training I do online every day. Let’s do something different and fun and it get, I don’t know. So again, many thanks Maria, for the work you do for our community and for joining us here today at the see that podcast.
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Thanks everybody.