Dave Derington: [00:00:00] Wait for it.
it’s Halloween. We’ve got to have fun with it.
Welcome to CELab, the customer education laboratory, where we explore how to build customer education programs, experiment with new approaches and exterminate the myths and bad advice that stopped growth. It stops growth dead in his tracks. I’m Dave Derington
Adam Avramescu: [00:00:31] and I am spooky Adam Avramescu. Dave Derington of the dead
Dave Derington: [00:00:40] or diabolic Dave
Adam Avramescu: [00:00:41] Diabolic Dave Derington and now I’ve lost mine, but we are super happy to be here on National Frankenstein Friday for a spooky episode of CELab.
Okay.
Dave Derington: [00:00:55] No, it’s also National Candy Corn day.
Adam Avramescu: [00:00:57] yeah. Why haven’t we done an episode on national candy corn day before?
Dave Derington: [00:01:00] Probably, it’s just so good really. So I like the ones with the chocolate
Adam Avramescu: [00:01:03] They make chocolate candy corn?
Dave Derington: [00:01:06] Yeah. It’s got, instead of the white orange, yellow, it’s got white chocolate yellow.
Adam Avramescu: [00:01:12] All right. I guess I have my assignment. I’m going to try to find that. Okay. So maybe not a spooky episode, but a seasonal episode, nonetheless. and why is that Dave? Why is it seasonal?
Dave Derington: [00:01:23] We’re coming to the end of conference season.
Adam Avramescu: [00:01:27] Woo. Oh, that sounds spooky. It’s okay. I’m going to stop doing that now.
Yeah. So that’s right. this is the time of year where we see conferences like DevLearn, which we actually spoke at last year. The Guild, formerly known as the E-Learning Guild, they run their learning conference “Learning 2020” this year. And this year for the first time ever, we had a three week run of customer education conferences.
Dave Derington: [00:01:50] Yes. Yeah. they were cool. They were all… Now, I think what we appreciate is that they were all online. So it made travel a whole lot less of a conundrum. and we’re in the midst of COVID; travel’s not happening, gathering restrictions are a big deal, but in a way, this may have been able to us to see what we saw last year.
We saw three customer education conferences. In a row. So what were they Adam?
Adam Avramescu: [00:02:15] Yeah, this year we did this year, not last year, right? Like we, we couldn’t have traveled to all the ones that we did last year. This year, we were actually able to do it. So that was great. So the fun started with, CEdMA’s annual conference called CEdMA Connect.
It continued with Skilljar Connect the next week. So I guess, connect is the name of the game. exactly, we’ve spoken at both of these conferences before, but we were actually joined this year with a new. Third conference Thought Industries COGNITION.
Dave Derington: [00:02:44] Yeah, that’s good. Different name. So that’s awesome.
And instead of recapping, what we’d like to do here is just a roll up. I think last time we did this last year, we did this. We basically had separate topics. This time, we’re going to roll it all into one and talk about some of the themes and the trends that we saw grouped into this. So let’s go ahead and get started.
Adam Avramescu: [00:03:06] Let’s do it. So before we talk about any of the individual conferences, maybe we can talk a little bit just about the field this year, because with the shift to online conferences, Dave, you and I were talking about this, a lot of pros, a lot of cons and frankly, a lot of learnings for those of us who are in the online learning space, because guess what, we’re going to be having to run online events for quite a while and possibly forever.
Not because we’ll be kept inside forever, but because the business landscape has changed. Dave, I’m curious, as we saw all the online conferences this year, what were some of the pros from your perspective?
Dave Derington: [00:03:44] Oh, my goodness. I think the number one thing that’s a stands out to me hands down and again, you and I both manage teams.
We’ve got folks that are interested in these conferences too, and we want them to attend. So for me, outright it’s flexibility, number one. I actually really dug a half day, multi-day span. The format that I could say, “okay, morning. Cool. I’ve got this conference, I’m going to attend”. I’d select my meetings and then, but I still had my afternoons to work and to reflect and actually keep up with stuff.
I don’t know about you, but for me that was easier lift. I can easily jump into stuff. I didn’t have to fly around. It was just wonderful. I was able to keep up with the things that I needed to do. I didn’t have this massive inbox filled when I got home.
Adam Avramescu: [00:04:30] Yeah. Because they were both centered around different time zones, as well as, in general, I think just trying to be sensitive to people’s schedules and engagement levels.
I appreciated that they were shorter runs during the day. I think it was, like I mentioned, it was easier for us to speakers too. If we wanted to do all three of these conferences, three weeks in a row, we would have had to fly from Nashville, is where the CEdMA conference was last year.
I don’t know where they would have done it this year, but we would have to fly from wherever they did it to Seattle, to Boston, within three weeks of each other. And I don’t know if we would have been able to do all three.
Dave Derington: [00:05:04] No, arguably I think we would’ve had to pick and choose and yeah. Add that would be a bummer.
There’s a lot of really good stuff in here. And what we’re trying to do is bring out why, the, I think we, it also, and I know I’ll probably mention this again, cause I’m really excited about it. There was a lot more engagement than I really actually would have expected. And in particular, the highlight of that is, Skilljar’s use of Hopin.
You know that there was all this chatter around, you could actually talk to people. You could actually get that experience of, I’ll talk about this later, you could actually get more of the real conference experience, which I didn’t expect. And it was a delight
Adam Avramescu: [00:05:41] And Hopin of course being the conference platform that they used.
And in terms of tooling, what, yeah, we will, we’ll come back to tooling, but, CEdMA also use Mentimeter during some of their sessions to add interactivity. So we did see some really interesting use of technology. During the sessions, which was cool.
Dave Derington: [00:05:58] Yeah, actually, that was really cool because all three conferences had a different flair, right?
They had their Thought Industries use their own platform. If I remember correctly.
Adam Avramescu: [00:06:06] They did. They used their own platform plus Zoom.
Dave Derington: [00:06:10] Which was cool and it worked really flawlessly and there’s some features in that I really dug, Skilljar used Hopin which I thought was absolutely amazing. CEdMA’s platform worked really well too. All three of them add net positive and the flexibility department I think was pretty cool.
Adam Avramescu: [00:06:23] Yeah. And we can talk some pros and cons, about that specifically, but before we move to the cons, I think from a recording perspective too, you found that a lot easier, right?
Dave Derington: [00:06:33] yeah, I mean, think about what we do day to day now. Every time I know my training team goes out to do, whether it bespoke custom training or instructor led that we have scheduled, we record all of it. So if somebody says, “Hey, after the fact, I missed it”. Cool. It’s easy. I actually can automate that. And this had that same thing in, I don’t know if, I know you’ve had this experience.
You go to a conference it’s live. And if you’re part of the organizing crew too, which you probably have been as well as I have is, particularly for educational pieces. the recording was flawless. And it was there. So we didn’t have to go and do the thing where “Hey, event management crew, I really need you to make sure to record this and get the video” and it doesn’t happen and stuff falls through.
And then we don’t have a recording of what we did.
Adam Avramescu: [00:07:17] The logistics of recording the session were a lot simpler this year.
Dave Derington: [00:07:20] A lot simpler that was one of the major highlights for me. Should we talk about cons?
Adam Avramescu: [00:07:24] I think, it wouldn’t be CONference with that con would it?
Dave Derington: [00:07:27] There’s always a little con conference.
Adam Avramescu: [00:07:29] Yeah. let’s go ahead.
Let’s talk about some of the cons.
Dave Derington: [00:07:32] Okay, so I’ll go ahead with the first one, because this is the first thing that stood out to me. The conferences landed all at one time. And I suspect that’s a natural thing, and maybe for our industry, we’ve come from this educational mindset and kind of think about eh, it’s September, October, it’s fall, now let’s do a conference.
But I know two of them landed literally on top of each other and the third was a week before or two weeks before. The only thing. I don’t want to criticize that. I think it’s great, but at the same time, I think we all need to be cognizant as, organizing entities to say, okay, yeah, we’re going to, we don’t want to compete.
We want people to come out to all of them. So I would encourage the industry and union.. who would’ve thought we’d have this problem Adam? We’ve got three conferences that are worth going to for customer education. So
Adam Avramescu: [00:08:21] good problem to have.
Yeah. and even though I don’t think, yeah, any of them actually conflicted with each other, it was week one, week two, week three.
It was CEdMA week one, Skilljar week two, Thought Industries week three. But definitely by the time you get to the third week of customer education conferences, if you’ve done all three and we did, maybe part of that was our problem. it, it does, it starts to get, It gets a little exhausting, even though it’s so much good content, it’s all, as it starts to permeate into you, you start to really feel the wear and tear of having done that much conferencing in a row.
Dave Derington: [00:08:55] Yeah, we were exhausted and actually two of them did land right on top of each other, but then the vendors both, that were organizing them both, collaborated and moved them up. That was. Kudos for that.
Adam Avramescu: [00:09:05] Yeah. That’s good that we saw that
Dave Derington: [00:09:07] Don’t fight. We’re going to all of them if we can.
Adam Avramescu: [00:09:12] Yeah. Yeah. Dave, to your point, like there’s only so much time where you can really schedule a conference. Like I think conference season is real and it’s real for a reason. They’re… you can’t really do the summer because people go on vacation. Can’t really do the winter because people are traveling again and it’s the holidays and it’s really hard to get people to come to a conference.
So really what does that leave you with? It leaves you with a band in the spring and a band in the fall.
Dave Derington: [00:09:37] So that made it June and then September to November.
Adam Avramescu: [00:09:41] Yeah. I recognize that it’s really difficult from a scheduling perspective to get that all to line up.
Dave Derington: [00:09:46] Yep. the other con…
Adam Avramescu: [00:09:49] yeah, we talked a little bit about technology.
Do you want to talk about the cons there?
Dave Derington: [00:09:53] I think we should. So what stands out for you as, I think you said technology is make or break. why do you think that?
Adam Avramescu: [00:09:59] Yeah, so we talked about some of the make, right? Like when the technology is used appropriately, it worked really well, in some ways we were able to simulate some of the things that make conferences really good in terms of doing networking and breakouts and being able to add interactivity into the sessions.
So those were really good, but at the same time, I think we got to see some contrasts because there were instances where the technology didn’t work very well or where it didn’t create a seamless experience. So for example, in an online format, when you’re jumping between platform and, from platform to platform, it can become easy to get lost.
Even for us who are mostly online learning professionals, if it wasn’t really easy to get, for instance, from, from an agenda to an individual meeting or from session to session that’s, drop-off right. That’s churn within the conference. So I think we saw a bit of that.
And I think that, sometimes there were barriers in terms of navigation or engagement. We saw the difference for example, between something like, getting on a meeting where there wasn’t any chance to really interact or comment or, have a little bit of community around the session.
It felt less engaging than some of the other platforms where you did have the opportunity to actually talk with other participants or with the speakers as they were presenting.
Dave Derington: [00:11:23] Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s really crucial. And we had a different flair and flavor with each one of the events and how things were assembled.
And what I thought was helpful as a lot of the organizations, I think in fact, all of them did some kind of technical run-through and advanced just to make sure things were working kind of, so at least we had familiarity with the tools. yeah, the only caveat is if somebody isn’t familiar and they’re a presenter, it was really compelling and helpful to have people learn what they’re doing first.
Because sometimes if you’re fumbling around, you don’t know what to do. It just it’s off putting.
Adam Avramescu: [00:11:58] Yeah. I think we saw a lot of progress, not perfection in these conferences and granted that’s probably true in a live format as well. It just looks and feels a little bit different,.
But I think you talked about this, there was a.. there was a pro and a con in terms of all the new technology that people were working with, because on the downside, there were definitely some technical difficulties. People’s internet went out. My internet went out during teleconferences. Yeah, exactly. And even though I was trying to back up by having my phone open, if you drop, you drop unfortunately.
but on the plus side, that also meant that, we saw this as each of the conferences went on, there was a lot of tolerance, I think in understanding when you get a group of, online learning professionals together for technical difficulties and full facilitations. So people were able to roll with the punches more.
Dave Derington: [00:12:44] Yeah. I thought it was actually funny as somebody commented after the last one we did, I think was Thought Industries where you literally dropped it near the end and it took you a while to get back on probably a minute or so, where. We have the good fortune that we do this and we can fill in the blanks.
And we were able to do that and recover it seamlessly. And those of us who do this kind of motion all the time are like, yep, no problems. We’re just going to roll with it. It’s all good. And everybody was, it was heartening to feel everybody’s like “yep, cool”. Don’t worry about it. But if we were in a different kind of medium, if we were in a professional stage environment and one of us dropped the ball, it’s a little bit more embarrassing.
So that was really cool. I felt him. I felt welcomed. Yeah, like we had a safety net.
Adam Avramescu: [00:13:26] Yeah. And I think I take this away too, for those of us who are training professionals and especially those of us who have moved from a, live in-person formats to online, that it’s more important than ever to really accept some of these technical hurdles with grace and with a plume, and really don’t let them trip you up because you might be really feeling that pressure and you’re not seeing that in time response from folks, as we used to say “Oh, we get it. the technology is what it is. Everyone’s internet drops”.
You might end up feeling really, really, really under pressure and feeling like you’ve absolutely failed. But I was pleasantly surprised to see that most people are very accepting of that, even though it is very inconvenient and not ideal. And I’m glad that it didn’t, let presenters ruffle their feathers too much.
Dave Derington: [00:14:11] No, it was awesome. And I think you might’ve seen one or two people get a little unnerved to begin with. I know I did. And then I was like, Nope, it’s cool work where everybody is cool with us. And in fact, I think it was important for all of us to embrace that because this is our lives. We’re going to have technical difficulties.
So I think we have one more that I brought up. I don’t think, I know. one thing I saw happening, fairly consistently, but perhaps not completely consistently is, those are the host who did prep work, and some coaching. It showed, virtual is really different. And having those run-throughs, especially like the technology checks where we’re just like, Oh, we’re just gonna run through this real quick, everybody get on and we’re going to test and do stuff that was super cool because I’m like, okay, I have confidence with this specific platform now because you showed to me once and I didn’t know what to expect.
Adam Avramescu: [00:15:03] Okay. The ones that aren’t a super commonly used, right? Like when you’re like, most of us at this point have used Zoom or GoTo, but even so still doing a tech check is really valuable. Yeah.
Dave Derington: [00:15:14] And a little coaching always helps because, some presenters may be presenting for the first time and that’s really good to give them like here’s some tips and stuff and make that optional.
If you’re not like, a lot like you and I, who could pick up and do a presentation off the cuff these days, because we practice so much.
Adam Avramescu: [00:15:33] Yeah. it’s true in general, when you’re talking about conference presentation that, practice, it’s practice makes perfect, or in the case of a, an online environment, maybe practice makes progress because I don’t know.
I don’t know if it’s possible to be super perfect when you’ve got your ISP working against you, but at the same time, I agree. Like I think we did see.. because they’d opened up, I think to more folks who might’ve been either presenting in an online format, in that way for the first time, people did feel less comfortable, I think, overall.
So the extra coaching, yeah. The extra coaching went a long way when they were able to provide it.
Dave Derington: [00:16:11] Yeah, let’s I would definitely say let’s do more of that next year. Make sure to gauge if everybody’s feeling comfortable, if they’re not give them tools to practice. we’re all out here and we can help with that too.
But, I think generally overall, we didn’t have problems there. It just seemed like there was a little bit of discomfort.
Adam Avramescu: [00:16:31] Yeah. Yeah. I think, new medium, not as comfortable. Absolutely makes sense. Dave, why don’t we, we’ve talked about a few of these themes and we’ve talked about the move to online.
I’m sure we’ll continue to weave these in, but why don’t we give a little bit of a recap of each of the three conferences and maybe talk about some of the highlights and things that we really, enjoyed or observed at the conferences.
Dave Derington: [00:16:54] I dig it. Why don’t we start off talking about CEdMA Connect. It was the first, first of the events and it happened on September 22nd and 23rd.
And again, for time travelers, we’re in 2020 hindsight is with us.
Adam Avramescu: [00:17:08] Chronological is the way to go. Cool. So Dave, we, this was the first time that we presented our customer education manifesto. Yeah, it’s very cool. Yeah. Which by the way, is available online at our site: customer.education . If you want to read it or sign it and we will we’ll post, I think at least one of the presentations we did as a, either as a bonus episode or a regular episode.
But do you want to talk a little bit, Dave, about what were your impressions of delivering the customer education manifesto?
Dave Derington: [00:17:41] this was our first time and I will admit a little bit of trepidation and I don’t know. It’s just so much fear of I’m more like an anticipation to see what a broader audience would think about it.
Adam Avramescu: [00:17:53] Yeah. Look, I know that it’s all been, I call it a “trepicipation”
Dave Derington: [00:17:58] “trepicipation”
Adam Avramescu: [00:17:59] Yeah. It’s about trepidations and anticipations.
Dave Derington: [00:18:02] you said another word earlier, that was a 50 cent word. I think I’ll give you a dollar for the made up ones.
Adam Avramescu: [00:18:09] We have a little money. I’m gonna neologize my way to the bank. All right.
yeah, no, I felt the same way. We didn’t know. We didn’t know how it was going to resonate. And I think especially to the CEdMA audience, because with CEdMa, even though at the conference this year, they were opening up to a lot more people because it was a free conference this year, without the travel requirements, I think more people were able to attend and they were opening it up beyond just CEdMA membership, the core of CEdMA’s membership, there are a lot of really, high flying education leaders, running really multi-million dollar education businesses.
So for us to go and talk about some of these practices that might feel a little bit spicy to people who have built really large solid education businesses, I was a little trepidatious, too.
Dave Derington: [00:18:56] Yeah, and I think that’s important because in, again, this is our sentiment. CEdMA has been transitioning into looking at the customer education market a lot more and I think because they’ve been around for quite a while.
Adam Avramescu: [00:19:07] Transitioning from what? From education services?
Dave Derington: [00:19:10] originally, yes, from education services, I would say is still a big part of it and is a focus and that makes sense to me. Now, when you think about just what you said, these people are running, that are attending and presenting, commonly are multimillion dollar established, mature organizations.
They’re public companies, mostly.
Adam Avramescu: [00:19:28] Yeah, very mature organizations,
Dave Derington: [00:19:31] very mature. And then this represents for us a shift. Not away from that. That’s still there education services, as I think the arc that we make, the journey we make from customer education into that world where by the time we’re done and we’ve gone through five or so years of development, you are education services still doesn’t mean that you’re not customer education too.
That’s how I perceive it.
Adam Avramescu: [00:19:55] Yeah. And here for our listeners, we’re kind of using education services and customer education as shorthand. it’s not that those are fundamentally different practices, but there are practices within like when you run an education services business, you’re usually first and foremost thinking about the business and the health of the business and the bookings and margin and revenue that come with that.
It becomes very operational versus when we say customer education, we’re talking about that in some ways, right? Like customer education teams can definitely get into the business of education services. but we’re also talking about some differences in philosophy, in differences, in the type of programs that are encompassed.
So there’s meaningful overlap, but there are different ways of doing things. And one thing that I think is interesting in general, about the CEdMA conferences for the past few years, they have really been thinking about the future of customer education. So I know, last year, we weren’t able to attend in Nashville, but we were, we were on video and part of the, yeah, exactly.
We were sort of there, thinking about the idea of customer education rebranding itself, in a way, in the world of customer success. And this year we had a similar keynote from our, our old friend Bill Cushard, always love hearing what he has to say. And he was talking about the next big thing in customer education.
Dave Derington: [00:21:09] Yeah, this was critical. And, we always love hearing from Bill and what he did, and this was identified this trend towards companies investing in learning… in learning businesses to build new jobs, skills and markets. So the trend is that it’s becoming a lot more common for companies to spin up parallel brands devoted to teaching new skills.
I saw this at Gainsight where we had our product training that my team led, but then we had a whole thought leadership and soft skills type training where it was the goal was to educate a CSM, a customer success manager on the kinds of things they knew before they even have a product, right?
that’s super important. So teaching those skills is something that’s going to help drive adoption of products because it’s change management. Isn’t it? In a way?
Adam Avramescu: [00:21:58] It’s also, I think it’s market development. And that’s the point that Bill was really trying to get at, in my opinion, like when Bill, so Bill, by the way, is the, he’s the general manager of Learndot, and Learndot is a part of ServiceRocket.
So he’s worked with a lot of companies and organizations who have not just built successful software products, but in many cases are building these standalone or adjacent learning businesses, on top of the software product. So for example, if you are an open source software company and you need a kind of a big cadre of skilled developers to really develop in that community, it makes a ton of sense to start building a business that actually trains those developers, to build those technical skills.
And I think that’s something that’s moving, it’s permeating the industry more and especially, the larger companies get, Bill gave some really good examples that I will not cannibalize for the sake of the podcast today, really talking… you gotta watch, you gotta watch the recording.
but I think his examples are really salient in the sense that it’s not just about providing product training and we say this in our manifesto, right? the first principle is really around teaching to value and the industry, not just teaching features.
But it’s not just about teaching people all the features and technical requirements of your product. It’s giving people these broader skills, skills that aren’t being taught in universities and colleges today, that will really help people get placed for jobs, that will help people become champions, and really ultimately will also help people use and adopt these new technologies and products.
yeah, I think it’s, I think there’s definitely something to this trend.
Dave Derington: [00:23:43] There is. And I know that I can tell you that I’m thinking about it now at Outreach even, that there is in our market, we’re helping sales leaders to envision how you use a new product that’s about, that goes way beyond what you would normally do if you’re just calling people cold.
so this is really cool. Let’s keep moving here though. I think you attended a session on seven habits of inclusive leaders. Can you tell us more about that?
Adam Avramescu: [00:24:06] That session was from Melissa Majors and this was another trend within the conferences that we saw this year. And I’m sure that this happened in, all sorts of conferences, not just in customer education ones, but overall big trend towards including some concepts around diversity engagement, inclusion and belonging.
And no doubt, this is in response to the shifts that we’ve seen this year. The attention that, has come around social justice issues, the Black Lives Matter movement, everything that’s going on in our country and in the world has also focused that attention back in the workplace. How can we make sure that historically underrepresented, voices are heard? And not just there, but really heard and engaged and making decisions.
So ultimately, these sessions, weren’t really focused on customer education best practices, but their skills, behaviors and mindsets that all leaders can drive. And it’s important for us as customer education leaders, to not just understand what diversity and inclusion and engagement and belonging are, but to really incorporate those into our own teams and practices, right?
that’s how we’re going to move forward as don’t just as an industry. but frankly, as a society,
Dave Derington: [00:25:21] Yeah, I think this is the kind of subject matter that always need to be included in these accounts because it’s a reminder. We’re more than just education, there’s themes of diversity inclusion that need to permeate all of our content.
We needed it. We needed to serve everybody and we need to actually understand those biases too. so that session was really cool. And I can tell you one that, I think, did you attend Alessandra Marinetti’s, session as well?
Adam Avramescu: [00:25:48] Oh yes, my dear friend Alessandra, I hope she’ll join us on the podcast sometime soon.
Dave Derington: [00:25:53] Yes, Alessandra, we have an open invitation for you to talk with us. She did a great case study about Box, which I attended. These are the kinds of sessions, and we’re going to talk about some of these throughout. These are the kind of sessions that are very helpful, particularly when you’re in a moment of need.
We always talk about that. Meeting somebody in their moment of need. I am consuming this kind of information. And again, with CELab, we’re always networking. We’re always learning and we’re always thankful for leaders telling us what their experiences are. she talked about how Box built a live event based certification program and how they adapted it to an online format this year.
This is, this was really cool and a good reminder for, those who are trying to drive less technical skills and more focused on certification as the driver for adoption behavior change, market maturity, the play, I keep thinking about HubSpot, right? When you put out a badge or a cert out there and it’s lightweight, it’s not proctored and all that kind of jazz.
Adam Avramescu: [00:26:50] Exactly. the goal is change management in some ways, right? if I get Box certified, I’m not just getting certified on how to say, develop on top of Box, cause that’s, Box is a supremely technical product in the way that, I don’t know, throw an example out there.
I can’t think of a good technical product off the top of my head, but, really as a Box admin and it was an admin certification where they really got their start. the goal here is to drive change management and adoption of Box organization and to really create best practices. and in fact, in our Slack certified program, for our admin certification, we try to drive a lot of those skills as well, even though there are more technical components as well.
I think it’s super important, but it also, again, comes back to market development and drives maturity within a category, right? The more box users, advocates, champions, there are out there who can really show all the things that box can do. and how box can really help you, within your organization, drive more organizational agility.
that’s a boon to them, that’s good for exactly. What’s good for box is good for their customers. Yeah.
Dave Derington: [00:27:54] Yes. I really liked the session. I think the thing that I would say pins it down for me is that certification’s a spectrum. It’s a continuum.
You know, what you and I have done on the high end for admins And those who are developers, is develop a program that’s going to really put them through the paces or the it’s more of an accountability and assurance to a company that someone certified and they know the full spectrum of what our products can do from a technical basis. But then there’s that sweet spot of well, “If I just go through training, it’s boring, let’s have something in the middle”.
And that’s what I’m always thinking about. How do you say and think about our customers? Many of them are very competitive with the gaming gamified nature of things. If you give people something that I can take a badge and they can promote themselves and say, “I’ve done this, I’ve learned that”, people are hungry for it particularly right now, because they’ve got that time.
Adam Avramescu: [00:28:45] Yeah. speaking of gamification, Daniel quick from Thought Industries gave a really good gamification session at et cetera as well. And I hope he’ll.. he’ll redeliver it again sometime because the, what I liked about it is it really bridged theory and practice very well. he brought a lot of the research around gamification to bear it, but he also gamified the session and he made amazing use of Mentimeter, to really make the session interactive and also helped us dispel some of the myths around, what is meaningful, gamification and game like elements versus what are just some of the trimmings of gamification that don’t actually work or drive results.
Dave Derington: [00:29:20] I have to say, I love this because I was an adjunct professor that taught game design for nearly 10 years. And what I learned from that and what I see now propagating into our marketplace or permeating everything, is the sensibility of what games do, how games teach you well, and Daniel summarized that really well, he brought in the elements and the key is, and I think what Daniel did a really good job was applying that finesse to say, we don’t have to make this silly or trite or, forced. It feels natural.
Adam Avramescu: [00:29:52] Yeah, absolutely. And you know that maybe pivots us into talking a little bit about the role of the vendors this year, because Daniel was representing Thought Industries.
We saw vendors play more of a role in CEdMA this year than they ever have before. we saw presentations from Skilljar, CloudShare, Raven 360, Caveon, Criterion, Strigo, SureSkills, Thought Industries. there were a lot of folks there and yeah, and I think some of the sessions like Daniel’s were focused more on industry best practices, and that was a good way to tie in vendors to the content.
I think I’d like to see, I’d like to see them make a little bit more room for practitioners and folks leading programs of various sizes. Like for instance, the panel with Christy Hollingshead, Eric Carpus, Wes Everson, Sharon Castillo, talking about their programs that someone from our customer education Slack channel led.
That was a really good way to hear these like hands on practitioner based, like folks in the field, what are they doing to build their programs from scratch. And I think sometimes there was a little bit of a tension between the vendor led content, which, some of it was more neutral.
Some of it was a little bit more focused on their products. and then just hearing from folks who are talking about their programs. I think that’s a, it’s a tricky balance to hit. And I think we’re going to see them continue to iterate back and forth on that.
Dave Derington: [00:31:09] Yeah. I look forward to that.
The things that I value more than anything is those, well, in face of what we’re here to do with CELab is it’s not about us. It’s about our network and it’s about. Us as a network sharing experiences and building a vertical, customer education is new and not new, as I said before, but what we’re doing through these conferences is we’re finding the others.
And then we’re trying all to give each other a voice and space to learn
Adam Avramescu: [00:31:36] in a way it’s really good. It’s almost as if we were trying to connect.
Dave Derington: [00:31:41] Ah, okay. Why don’t we take the, take this into the next connect, Skilljar Connect 2020.
Adam Avramescu: [00:31:51] Yes. And we released our live episode that we did. So Dave, you and I did a live episode of CELab.
We did a mailbag, which at this point should be in everyone’s feeds. You can see it. We mentioned there would be a part two. Still on the docket, we’re going to do it ’cause there were so many questions that were submitted to us in the Skilljar Connect Slack channel that we did not have time to answer all of them.
But, Dave, what did you think? there was a lot of interactivity in this one. They used Hopin as a platform. There was a Slack channel. There’s a lot going on.
Dave Derington: [00:32:18] Yeah, the thing again, I’d said early on is I really, I think we can give Linda attribution for this, the Hopin find was great.
What made this conference for me? It was the fact that I walked away from it. Actually having talked to people like I love to do at a conference, Hopin had a basically like a chat roulette platform or function and
Adam Avramescu: [00:32:43] maybe, hopefully not like chat roulette
Dave Derington: [00:32:46] it. no, in a good way.
it was, Sorry.
I got interrupted here by people walking through the facility, through my house.
Adam Avramescu: [00:32:54] That’s work from home life,
Dave Derington: [00:32:56] I work from home. what was cool is that you could opt in to a virtual chat function and you’ll be randomly paired with somebody else, which at one point was you, at one point was Linda, at one point was Asheesh.
Adam Avramescu: [00:33:09] but that’s pretty funny that you and I got paired with each other.
Dave Derington: [00:33:11] I know it was crazy. It was wonderful because we needed to talk anyway, how did it go? What’d you think? But, it was initially like three minutes and I think it opened up to about six or more at the end. And I had some really good insightful conversations and met some people that I’m still talking to.
So kudos for that find. I think that was really helpful.
Adam Avramescu: [00:33:29] Yeah, absolutely. we actually used Hopin as well for an event we hosted earlier this year it was called Slack tour. So we did a bit of a virtual tour. So that’s the first time I was exposed to hop in and I was super impressed with it as a platform.
So I was happy to see it again.
Dave Derington: [00:33:46] Yeah. And, we have new friends and the other thing that we think they did well, I would say it was, is the content track, like you were saying, what, why don’t you expand on this? Because I think you brought this up previously and you can tie into what you’d said before
Adam Avramescu: [00:33:58] I did.
And, with Skilljar, they used to have just one track because it was a smaller conference. Everyone was in one room. And the only time that we would really do breakouts were for something like a round tables and round tables have been a part of Skilljar Connect since the very first one. But this time they actually decided to divide the event up.
So, in recognition of the fact that it’s not just customer education leaders going. We don’t just want to hear the same things every year about strategy and monetization and metrics and all that good stuff. There are more and more practitioners from the teams coming, and that might be trainers that might be communication or sorry, community managers, might be instructional designers.
So I really appreciated that they thought this year too, divide it into the leadership, general customer education and management track and the content track and the content track was extremely well attended every, I think. Every single time slot, the content track probably had twice as many folks in there as the leadership track, which is super cool.
Dave Derington: [00:35:01] It’s extremely cool. We want that. So what are some of the sessions maybe we get, let’s go through some of the sessions that we found, that were highlights.
Adam Avramescu: [00:35:11] Yeah,
Dave Derington: [00:35:11] absolutely. And attend to everything, but we had to talk to, and that was one of the downsides for us is that in all three events we were talking.
So sadly we miss some, but the great thing is they’re all recorded. So we can go back and catch up on what we missed.
Adam Avramescu: [00:35:23] one of the, one of the best reviewed ones, a lot of my team members went to these conferences. And this was one that all of them said was fantastic. So I can’t wait to catch up on it.
It was actually the one that went at the exact same time as us. It was Debbie Smith. From Braze talking about instructional writing best practices. That was a huge hit.
Dave Derington: [00:35:42] Yeah. I heard a lot of great things about it and this one on my backlog to watch again. but I obviously it’s brought to the attention that instructional design and writing is something we all want to get better at.
So that was really cool. Yeah.
Adam Avramescu: [00:35:56] It’s like a very core skill for those of us in con in customer education. And I think one thing that Debbie did really well, at least from what I’ve heard, I need to actually watch it, but I’m sure she did it well ’cause she’s a fountain of practical knowledge, is, at sometimes at a conference it’s really hard to find that balance between talking at a really high level and never diving into the substance.
Versus being so tactical that what you’re saying, doesn’t really resonate with the audience because it’s not their use case or it’s not their specifics. And I think Debbie, always does a really good job of finding the balance between the two of them. And it sounded like she, she struck gold again this time.
Dave Derington: [00:36:31] Yeah. Very cool. Highly recommended.
Adam Avramescu: [00:36:33] Yeah. Another one that I liked was the content creation at scale, and that was Randon and Kyle from Jamf. basically they were walking through, if you are a growth stage company and you are creating and iterating a vast amount of content, as for most of us in tech, that’s what we’re doing.
It’s a huge problem, that we’re always faced with. And so they showed how to incorporate agile processes for content development and how to iterate on that and prioritize updates over time. that’s something that’s a very real problem for all of us.
Dave Derington: [00:37:03] Yeah. I can highlight a couple other episodes that I thought were really cool.
Craig Morrison and Jeff …Craig Morrison, Jeff Resnick of OSIsoft did a session on training a global audience. And this is really relevant for me now, because again, I’m… You and I have both been in different phases at different parts of our journey and where I’m at right now, is I’m looking at globalization, internationalization.
I’ve got other markets to hit, at Outreach. So I was really tuned into this. I think they did a great job, gave me things that were actionable. I can immediately go back and start thinking about, I’m in the weeds with this already. Great work to that one. another couple I really appreciated was the LinkedIn one was fun.
the Stephanie’s Stephanie Harrison Pellegrino, and Sonia Salani of LinkedIn are talking about collaborating with basically education teams across different product lines.
Adam Avramescu: [00:37:56] Yeah. Because they have recruit LinkedIn recruiter, LinkedIn sales. Yeah. And they have to figure out how to still have a coherent education strategy.
Dave Derington: [00:38:05] And I think what’s even cooler. Adam is that while LinkedIn is, public company, they’re pretty big, they’re owned by Microsoft and hearing the themes of customer education at that level of scale is super important to us. Because again, we talked about educational services is one thing, but customer education doesn’t stop after you make it as a public company.
It has a function. And typically it’s more of a customer success function, but that was really fun. I liked that. And then I’ll give your team some praise, Leanna and April, on, how are you. Assembling content to support your certification program, which my team listened to. And they’re like, Hey, this is cool.
We’re going to do similar things. Hey, thanks for the, thank your team for the help. It was this really good session.
Adam Avramescu: [00:38:50] Oh, I’m always super proud of my team and I was really glad to hear what, April and Leanna had to say about building the Slack certified program. So yeah, definitely kudos to them.
Dave Derington: [00:39:01] Okay. Shall we close this out by talking about the third of our events? Thought Industries COGNITION.
Adam Avramescu: [00:39:09] Let’s talk about COGNITION.
Dave Derington: [00:39:12] What was different about this one?
Adam Avramescu: [00:39:14] We iterated on our six principles of customer education.
Dave Derington: [00:39:21] are we doing agile? What principle is that again?
Adam Avramescu: [00:39:24] It’s one of them. Is that five? I don’t know. I don’t have a, yeah, absolutely. So we did that and that was a, it was actually pretty meaningfully different from the first time that we presented at CEdMA. But both times we presented what we really tried to do was to highlight the stories of customer education programs that embodied each of these principles.
And we mix them up and we change them between sessions because there’s more than one program that does each of those principles. but in this one, we also tried to do a little bit more storytelling and make it more imagistic. And that to me, felt like a change for the better.
Dave Derington: [00:39:59] Yeah, we were all over this one, but both between us, I think we had our joint session.
we did, I know I did a session, a panel on defining KPIs for success. I think you did two more.
Adam Avramescu: [00:40:13] I did one more. I did one more than it was like, “yeah, you’ve created a customer education program now, what?” was my panel.
Dave Derington: [00:40:18] Yeah. And that’s a good question. As I, I sometimes I feel that, you get, you build all this stuff and now okay.
“What’s next?”
Adam Avramescu: [00:40:26] yeah. that was interesting too, because a lot of the folks who are at that panel were people who were new. They hadn’t just built a customer education program, they actually were leading fairly mature programs. So there were some people who had just built it. And now what? but it was interesting to hear from people who are at different stages, different maturity levels.
And, at that point now, what? looks very different from team to team.
Dave Derington: [00:40:49] It does. And it’s really interesting, for some of the key sessions, we attended one that immediately stuck out in my actually or two that stuck out of mine. My mind, Mark Roberge, former CRO of HubSpot, and then Daniel Quick’s customer education playbook to me were big deals.
the HubSpot presentation.
Adam Avramescu: [00:41:05] Yeah. That’s exactly what I was about to ask. What did you take away from HubSpot?
Dave Derington: [00:41:10] if that one was more, it was fun. It was more of this casual interview. And I think, was it not Barry leading that session?
Adam Avramescu: [00:41:18] Yeah, I think it was Barry and Mark talking to each other. Yeah. There’s talking about this, about Barry, the CEO of a Thought Industries.
Dave Derington: [00:41:23] Yeah. Hello, Barry. Thanks for being on our podcast.
Adam Avramescu: [00:41:27] I feel free if we have any new listeners, I’m just trying to explain who all who everyone is.
Dave Derington: [00:41:30] Who are these folks? Yeah, I’m going to have to go back and listen, but, this was fun for me and I just kinda let it wash over me and. We hear about the HubSpot story.
And I think they’re novel. I’m not going to spoil this for you. I’m just going to put a pin in it and say, this is one that I would pay attention to because it really interrelates this cross-functionality, how we all have to collaborate together to achieve an educational outcome, a goal.
And I think one of the things that HubSpot did quite well, and it’s still there, is they had this no light certification program that anybody can get they, and the story he told about how he had a conversation with a person who loved it so much, I love what they’re doing so much and was such a fan of their program.
And he’s, he said I was scrambling around to figure out who this person was. And I realized they’re not even a customer. They just think they’re our customer. And how aspirational Adam is that. That. And I’ve seen this before. I’ve had one experience like this before, where I’d had an open program and I found a student who was so passionate and so interested in what we were doing, that they learned everything up to the point of becoming certified and an evangelist for it.
So that was a fun, that’s like my takeaway. I’m probably missing a lot of the details and the things that he was talking about.
Adam Avramescu: [00:42:45] It’s really interesting to hear his story. Yeah, exactly. Like how they really. Cause we always hold up HubSpot as an example of someone who’s doing customer education really well.
and really I think doing it from a marketing and advocacy perspective, because they’ve created a certification program that is really helping to build an industry category around their program. Like this, anyway, won’t go too far into that. Yes, definitely check that out.
They actually have the, the recordings up on the Thought Industries COGNITION site. Skilljar has theirs as posted too. So you should definitely check those out with the Customer Education Playbook, Daniel Quick’s session again, always great to hear from Daniel Quick and what I really liked. and again, there actually is, there’s a piece of content marketing associated with this as well.
You can search for the Thought Industries, Customer Education Playbook. But what Daniel did was break down how to build a customer education program into a framework that you can use sequentially to actually build a practice. And he had questions at each step that you could ask that would help you build the program at each step and know that you were heading in the right direction.
Dave Derington: [00:43:49] Yeah, it was really cool. we don’t have to read all of these bullets and you, enumerated them in our notes. but things like, Hey, the first step to find your goals, define your success for your customer. I’m not gonna read this whole list, but things like, educate your team on who will actually deliver the education.
Adam Avramescu: [00:44:05] That’s an interesting one. That’s not one that I would have included if I were doing a 12 step program, but I thought it was a really interesting one and valid, like the way that they framed it, because your team has to have some level of subject matter expertise, to actually be creating the content.
So I think like when I think about these 12 steps, like some interesting pieces for me were number one, it aligns with the idea that you and I talk about a lot, that you really should have a strategy and a goal coming into your program because a lot of people start really organically. They just start developing a bunch of content and then they attach themselves to a goal or success criteria in later.
but here they’re saying, if you want to start a customer education program from scratch, here’s how to really define what your program is here to do. What is your charter? what do you exist for, and how does that tie to ultimately what’s going to make your customer successful and they don’t even start talking about content and format, which is usually the first question people ask.
Those didn’t even show up until, steps four or five, six, and you don’t actually even create any content until step eight. So it’s really, I think, a good reinforcement, in a way to help bypass some of the questions that people ask initially that I think are the wrong questions to ask. don’t start talking about content until you start talking about what your program’s here to do.
Dave Derington: [00:45:16] Yeah, and I think this is Adam missed a lot. one of the things that I am ever thankful for from my career is I’ve had an opportunity to be a fortune 100 level consultant. And you think this way, all the things that Daniel had listed out, you just don’t go jump in and start doing.
But in reality, a lot of people who find their way as an accidental customer education, professional, I’m looking at Cammy Bean’s book here The Accidental Instructional Designer. So we find ourselves into this and then we just start doing and that’s okay. You know, it doesn’t mean that you can’t go back and do those, but I really truly love this.
This should propagate up to the level of customer success programs and leaders in customer success who are thinking about customer education. And it gives a good template in combined I would say with, and Daniel pointed us, 20 to us, and it was fortunate that he did hurt his right before we did ours.
Where we go into now, we’re going to talk about these six principles and that again, speaks to like step eight and beyond. we’re all in this ecosystem, performing together. Let’s figure out what all we’re trying to actually do. What are the metrics? What are the things our leadership’s wants to do?
And then we have a framework or a manifesto that guides us to achieving that goal in a repeatable scientific in fact way.
Adam Avramescu: [00:46:33] Yeah, absolutely. it’s just nice to see more frameworks, more courseware, just more resources out there for someone building a customer education program. Cause, you’re only a few years ago, if you were building a custom more education program and you weren’t doing it within the lens of education services, you had very few places to start.
And now we’re starting to see much more of a PR proliferation around, around this area. And in fact, Skilljar also, launched something around this. They launched a customer education certification program that includes courseware and an assessment. That was a really strong theme. I think from the conferences this year is that now the vendors are here to play and they’re really there.
They’re doing sort of what Bill Cushard pointed out at the beginning of the CEdMA conference, that they’re starting to build skills among practitioners and the leaders of the future so that they can run more effective customer education programs. And hopefully in return will become the future customers of companies like Skilljar, like Thought Industries, like a lot of the other customer education platforms that we see out there.
Dave Derington: [00:47:31] Yeah. And actually the final note that I can think of for this is; I really encourage all of the hosts to consider, the price point for these conferences. But one thing that I think was a palpable change, like none of them were expensive. I don’t think, and some were free, but what’s the palpable change here is that they’re open.
I don’t have to necessarily be a customer of your platform. And I’m going to be adamant about this, my friends and those of you who are my friends at vendors, that’s important to us because if you’re cut out because you’re not a customer, but you’re giving us these awesome stuff and this excites us and it’s a prospecting play.
it’s, I might not become your customer today. Maybe tomorrow? I don’t know where I can evangelize. you’re doing the right thing. By making this an open accessible platform and yeah, by all means show us your platform and what it does. We want to see that too. but that was big, kudos, big kudos to all of you for keeping open a fence. Thank you.
Adam Avramescu: [00:48:32] Yes. Thank you. Absolutely. and speaking of inclusion and openness, that was, I think that was another highlight of the COGNITION conferences that they had Vernā Myers, who was the VP of inclusion strategy from Netflix. And so again, continuing that trend to focusing more on diversity and inclusion and belonging within the frame of a customer education conference.
I thought it was, I thought it was good. Like I’m glad to see us opening dialogue yeah. About these issues and continuing to talk about them and continuing to make them top of mind, because it’s one of those things where. you can hear it once, you can hear it twice. You can go to, your company’s unconscious bias training, but you’ve got to hear these things so many times for them to really internalize it and to implement the type of change that’s needed.
So I’m really, I was glad to see the focus there.
Dave Derington: [00:49:19] Yeah. And that’s actually, it was great. I sat in on that too. I, we can’t hear this enough. We have to keep bringing it into our DNA because it’s not just about one thing it’s about, “Hey, you might have forgotten that the people with disabilities or you’re into your website and you need to provide, closed captioning or, audio only feeds” and things like that.
Adam Avramescu: [00:49:40] I think accessibility is huge and it’s something that we do. We overlook far too often. So Dave. Yeah, we did a lot of conferences. are you exhausted? I’m exhausted.
Dave Derington: [00:49:53] I, yeah, I’m exhausted, but
Adam Avramescu: [00:49:57] I’m entering but, but I’m energized too. I think that just seeing kind of the groundswell of support around customer education and seeing how these conferences grow every year, really shows to me that we’re continuing to build a really strong, healthy community in customer education.
Dave Derington: [00:50:10] And we, we are really, truly thankful to each host. CEdMA, thank you. Skilljar, thank you. Thought Industries, thank you. We thank you for your bottom of our hearts for including us in these.
Adam Avramescu: [00:50:21] Yeah, thank you so much.
Dave Derington: [00:50:22] It’sactually a prominent position. It was really helpful. And something else that I least want to share is that for you as listeners in the audience, we do this and we’re networking.
we’re learning, we’re growing. We want to hear your voice. If you want to connect with us and you have things that you want to share, or maybe you did a talk at one of these sessions, and you’d like to revisit that and improve on an iterator on it, or have a conversation about it. Reach out to us. We would love to have you on the show.
Adam Avramescu: [00:50:49] And speaking of reaching out to us, if you want to learn more, we have a podcast website at HTTP:// Customer.education, where you can find show notes and other material on Twitter. I am at @adamavramescu
Dave Derington: [00:51:03] and I’m @davederington
Adam Avramescu: [00:51:05] special thing Koda. Hey, you want to thank him?
Dave Derington: [00:51:08] I want to thank him, Alan Koda.
Hey, thanks. My friend, our theme music rocks.
Adam Avramescu: [00:51:14] And if this helped you out, you can help us out by subscribing in Apple podcasts, anywhere you get podcasts. Leave a positive review because that helps us even more. It really helps expose our podcast to other people and keep this thing going
Dave Derington: [00:51:26] and to our audience:
Thanks for joining us today. Get out there, educate, experiment, and find your people.
Adam Avramescu: [00:51:34] Thanks everyone.