Eugene Lee  00:00

It’s the proactive nature of how do we grow our business versus saving and I think that’s a mind shift for people out there right now.

Adam Avramescu  00:17

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 bad advice that stop growth dead in its tracks. I’m Adam Avramescu. And we are here with a very special guest today. Eugene Lee from OMERS Ventures. Eugene, would you like to say hi?

Eugene Lee  00:36

Hi, guys. It’s great to be here. And I’m excited to talk. 

Adam Avramescu  00:39

Yeah, I’m excited to talk with you as well. We’ve had some good conversations in the past about customer education from the investor perspective. And so for our listeners, Eugene is a principal at OMERS Ventures, which is a VC fund with $1 billion under management, and over 50 investments in b2b and b2c tech companies, including Contentful, Crunchbase, Hootsuite Clue, Rover, Shopify, Vidyard, and wattpad, among others, some big names. And prior to joining OMERS Ventures, Eugene was VP of business operations at Copper, which is Google’s number one recommended CRM, prior to that founded and led the business operations team at Pinterest, and experience before that at Yahoo and Pixate. So quite, quite the list of experiences. Eugene, I’m very excited to talk to you today.

Eugene Lee  01:28

Yeah, likewise, I think I’m excited to dive into customer success and customer education, just having, you know, experienced some of the pain points from prior lives that you had already just listed off. So it’s an area of focus of ours, at OMERS and excited to kind of walk through, you know, our thought process and, and from their own. Yeah,

Adam Avramescu  01:50

yeah, you’ve you’ve kind of seen this from, from both sides. And, you know, Eugene, we’ve done a previous series on this show earlier this year, where we interviewed CEOs of customer education companies, and one question that we asked all of them was, when you talk to your investors or your board, what are some of the topics that are top of mind for them? Or what are you talking about with them? So yeah, I’m really curious. Yeah, go ahead.

Eugene Lee  02:17

No, I was gonna say like, it’s a great question that we think of, obviously, we think through a lot. And I would say, as in kind of the the lead into that, I would say, a lot of the topics of conversation, especially during during COVID, and during this time is, you know, the issue of retention, and what are your existing customers? And how are they doing and how are they performing? Which obviously lends itself into into customer success and customer education, and why it’s such a passion point for us here at OMERS because everyone wants to talk about retention and gross gross retention and net dollar retention, and how do you affect that? And so these are some of the programs that we get excited about, on how to combat some of the churn that happens at these at our portfolio companies and companies that we we evaluate as well, from a prospect perspective.

Adam Avramescu  03:08

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It’s in some ways, when, when the market is growing, and growth is on everyone’s minds, then, you know, net new names, and bringing in new dollars is super top of mind. And of course, you’re gonna want to, you know, invest in companies that really support pre sales, marketing and sales. But it sounds like what you’re saying, and I’m curious to learn a little bit more about this is that, you know, especially, you know, in a situation like we are right now, protecting those customers, and protecting that revenue is super important. And that’s going to drive increased investment in companies that really support retention, customer success, customer education. So I’m really curious from an investor perspective, what does the market look like right now for for companies who are in the customer sucucess and customer education space? 

Eugene Lee  03:56

Yeah, I think we’re, I think we’re at the, you know, tip of the iceberg in terms of interesting things that are happening within customer success and customer education. I think if you look back over the last, I don’t know, call it five or ten years, you mentioned the pre sales process. A lot of the innovation has happened during that, you know, in those in those spaces, whether that’s, you know, sales enablement or sales engagement, or all the different cuts of the category of what happens on the pre sale side. You haven’t seen that as much on the post sale side. I don’t know, I actually don’t know why.

But I think it’s starting to become more of a focus. And I think, as you think about how companies think through how they grow their, their business, obviously, you can grow it through through new bookings, but you can grow your business through your existing book of business. And that comes through what we believe as, you know, the customer success and customer education aspects.

And so I think we’re just scratching the surface of you know, I think I think Gainsight had kind of put customer success on the map a few years ago. And then now you’re starting to see some of the same kind of dynamic that happened on the pre sale side, starting to happen on the post sale side within customer success of having you know, slivers of customer education start to impact, you know, customers or onboarding, or customer support or community or even, you know, the like the the Leica analogy to sales up now. Now you’re starting to see positions of, you know, CSM, CS ops come up, come up.

And so and how do we build tools for those individuals who are affecting what is a large piece of, or hopefully becoming a large piece of, of revenue for these companies as they continue continuing to grow? So I think, I think it’s an exciting time to be on a post sale side, I think, definitely Gainsight, I put it, put it kind of on the map, in a formal sense. And I think it’s only going to evolve from from here on out. And so we’re excited to kind of get through all the different categories and find some of the next generation winners on the post sale sides, because it’s definitely here, it’s here to stay.

Adam Avramescu  06:13

Yeah, and I think you’re right, there was a pretty large shift in the market that started to happen, especially around the time, you know, gainsight, you’re right, was doing a lot of category creation, around customer success, as a profession of, you know, trying to formalize the role and the discipline. And the idea of operations. And automation has just become more and more important over time, because now you’re building larger Customer Success teams who are tasked with not just protecting this revenue, but you know, I think they’ve, they’ve shown in studies over and over that it’s far less expensive to renew your current customers than it is to go out and hunt for, for new business. So it actually becomes a trigger for expansion. But when you mentioned, you know, you mentioned kind of generations of companies, and how you think the next generation will be, you know, in an even more exciting position.

How would you say that investing in customer success and customer education today differs from kind of the previous generation of companies who are in the post sale space?

Eugene Lee  07:14

I think so I think this lends to, just almost what you, just what you just said, I think there’s a, a shift that’s happening or has has been happening, it’s become ever more prevalent. Where, as companies look to figure out how to grow their business, it is not just as we’ve discussed, a little bit on the pre sale side or acquiring new customers. It’s on the post sale side, and it’s it’s the shift is happening in terms of, hey, let’s not be reactive, of our current customer base, and waiting till that point of, you know, churn or when they’re about to churn because that’s effectively it’s, it’s too late. It’s how do we be proactive in not thinking about necessarily churn but you know, retention, in a positive sense, but then also expansion, as you kind of mentioned, you know, in the in the intro, and so I think that’s changing how, you know, this the shift on why, you know, investors are starting to get more more interested in this in this category, because it’s a strategy now is not a defense mechanism is this is a growth strategy.

And I think that’s a fundamental shift of how people, or at least how we at OMERS, are thinking about, about the customer success, and even customer education kind of landscape. And how do you deploy that as a functional strategy to grow your business? And I think you’re seeing it become more aware among not just execs at companies now, but it’s filtering all through, you know, there are many more customer education roles now than there were, you know, even a year ago or two years ago, or CSM roles that are, you know, more prevalent and so I think you’re just seeing that, because it’s the proactive nature of how do we grow our business versus saving and I think that’s a mind shift for people out there right now.

Adam Avramescu  09:16

Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of that too. And especially now if you think about the the number of opportunities that are out there not just for CSMs, for customer education roles, but also the effort that’s getting put into formalizing those skills. So you’re seeing more certifications out there for CSMs, you’re seeing more formalized education for customer education leaders and customer education professionals. So it’s really cool to see that that market building up but I agree with you a lot of that comes from the growing awareness that customer education and customer success are not not reactive plays like I’m sure you remember; There was a lot of talk, you know, a few years ago comparing customer success to a leaky bucket or I guess comparing churn to a leaky bucket where If your company’s strategy was built all around, you know, bringing in new bookings and new dollars, but you weren’t protecting your existing revenue, then you’re just going to lose those customers to churn.

Eugene Lee  10:13

Yeah, I think you’re seeing,I think, as you’re seeing SaaS become the predominant platform or business model, you know, over the last couple years, even even longer. You can’t just fill the top of the funnel. And you know, it, people are getting smarter around SaaS metrics, let’s say. And so as people, it becomes a math exercise to some point. And so there’s plenty of smart people looking at SaaS business models. And if you’re just letting everyone, you know, churn out that you’re adding to the top, we’ll just, it’s not an efficient marketplace for you. And so you got to plug the

Adam Avramescu  10:58

The CAC/LTV ratio, right?

Eugene Lee  11:01

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so it’s, you know, you can, and then it’s just, you know, you’re burning, burning burning money on the marketing side, or however you’re acquiring these customers, all for nought. And so, we’ve seen a lot of companies, and we continue to tell our own portfolio is, you know, growth can come multiple different ways. And so it’s not always about, you know, acquiring users, it’s about acquiring the right user, and hopefully having them stay in and become, you know, make them successful customers on your own platform. And, and hopefully, you know, that creates that flywheel where your customers are your best, you know, in a sense salespeople where they bring in more customers that are like minded, and that want to stay on your platform. And so, I think, because the evolution of SaaS is just gotten to a point where, you know, people understand how the business works, you know, you got to plug that hole before you go, you go move forward, because it’s not growth at all costs, at least that how we view things.

Adam Avramescu  11:55

Yeah, and I think there are more in the market who would agree with that we’ve kind of shifted from, from that growth, growth at all costs mentality, and growth, growth hacking attitude to really trying to learn how to build more sustainable business. And so maybe, maybe the leaky bucket metaphor is, maybe it’s time for a new update to that maybe it’s like with with churn and the call is coming from inside the house, or something like that. Yeah, I would use the.. go ahead. No,

Eugene Lee  12:19

we’ve we’ve in the past, you know, and some operating frameworks that I’ve used in the past, at prior companies, you know, we’ve never really thought of as a bucket per se, or a funnel per se. We’ve used different models. We’ve used you know, or frameworks we’ve used, okay, I think a copper, we use something that was, you know, you kind of turn the the funnel onto a side, you bolt another funnel on to the other side, and it’s kind of a bow tie. And we created this bow tie mode, I think maybe Zora, or someone kind of made that popular a few years ago. But it’s, it’s how do you, you can’t.. it.. the process just doesn’t stop at the transaction or the sale of the business. Right? There’s another part post sale. And so I think the emphasis now is, what is happening on a post sale? And how do we create, you know, whatever the post sale funnel is, or you know, flywheel or whatever you want to call it, there needs to be process, and it needs to be tools, and companies that are focused on that other side of the transaction or the funnel. And so I think that’s, again, just harping on it. I think that’s why you’re seeing a lot of activity and innovation, our people focused on the space.

Adam Avramescu  13:36

Yeah, I agree. And I’ve definitely seen a lot of a lot of interest now come to doing onboarding the right way. You know, even in the consultant space, we’ve had Donna Weber from Springboard Solutions on the show before, she is all about the idea of the orchestrated onboarding, and really setting up customers for you know, sustainable success over time. And I think it speaks to customer success and customer education both becoming more, more mature and more programmatic. They’re not just activities you do, but they’re actually part of your strategy.

And so I’m curious, like, when you think about investing in these companies, and what what folks are doing, do you see differences between the state of the customer success market, which is, you know, had a little bit more time, I think, to evolve and customer education market, which maybe is making a little bit more of a pivot from from education services, it’s kind of a newer thing. Do you see differences between the state of those markets?

Eugene Lee  14:29

I think they’re, I think the two of them are starting to help create an ecosystem for each other. And I think cus-, to me, customer education is a, again, it’s a strategy that helps a customer customer success, philosophy or idea, right, and it’s a way to help prevent churn or retain or actually help grow your business. Farmers through adoption. It’s just it’s another way similar to what you mentioned on onboarding, right, you want to make sure that your customers are on boarded correctly so that they use the product the right way, and they hold them ultimately become great customer, long, long standing customers.

And so I think customer education, it’s a customer success is an idea. And I think customer education is a specific strategy on how we can help our existing customers, adopter or train onto our platform, I think it’s becoming more popular. I think, for me, I think it’s just behind; in terms of like, iterations of customer success, because Gainsight just started, you know, a long time ago, but I think it’s just a sub theme, I call it a sub theme of a broader customer land-, customer success landscape that’s ever growing. And I think the narrative is changing on, you know, from education services to, you know, how do we best onboard and best train our customers to use our product? The best, which, which makes complete sense, just as much as you know, the optimization side of how do we go down the funnel and acquire the best, cheapest customer on that side? And so I think you’re starting to see this, this evolution led, I think, led by a kind of customer education.

Adam Avramescu  16:23

Yeah, and, you know, we’ve even heard from, from some investors in the space, how their strategy is to kind of invest down the funnel, where they might have started with investing in sales and marketing platforms, and you know, their respective sales ops, marketing Ops, platforms, as the years have gone on. And now it’s, it’s kind of getting down into customer success and customer education.

Eugene Lee  16:44

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. No, I agree. No, go keep going. I agree.

Adam Avramescu  16:49

I was gonna say it was interesting to hear you say that as well. Because, you know, when I think about, for instance, you know, Gainsight, owning the customer success space, and the fact that you said, you know, they were, they were kind of early to the party, and they’ve been cultivating building, you know, building that category. You know, Gainsight is, is not all there is to customer success, right? There’s a ton of other parallel things that happen around game sites, core competencies, right. Gainsight is really good at reporting. Gainsight is really good at automation. Now, they’ve kind of gotten into like product telemetry and messaging, but there’s a much broader space within customer success, and that, you know, customer education is one of those parallel disciplines.

Are there others that you’re seeing really starting to grow as time goes on?

Eugene Lee  17:34

Yeah, I mean, I think I think onboarding and you know, the digital adoption platforms are starting to become interesting, I think, I think I mentioned, you know, CS Ops, similar to the sales ops and marketing ops function, start starting to grow. So I think some interesting things are happening there. I think there’s a, there’s an interesting dynamic that’s happening with, as it relates to customer education, in terms of the LMSs is that are becoming a little bit more prevalent in terms of, you know, how do they think about customer education, and then also the internal side as well, that’s starting to bleed into kind of customer success, which is starting to get a little bit interesting, because it’s the same, it’s similar conceptually.

And so I think that’s, again, it’s going back to this ecosystem that is starting to create and lead by kind of Gainsight, I have always compared Gainsight, to, you know, the sales force of the CRM on the pre sales side. But then you have all this other activity led by, you know, the high spots, the seismics, the sales loss of the world, that are building, you know, these sub themes under the kind of the pre sale side, I think the same thing, again, is happening on the post sale side. And with all these different kind of subcategories within customer success.

Adam Avramescu  18:55

Yeah, it’s really interesting to see. And, you know, my my co host, Dave Derington, he used to be at, at Gainsight himself. And more, more recently, now he’s at Outreach. So it’s kind of seen both sides of that, as well. You hit on a couple of things that are really interesting here. One is digital adoption platforms. And we’re certainly seeing that as more of a theme within customer education for customer education to try to own digital adoption as part of the the customer education portfolio. And then another theme, and maybe this is the one we can actually talk about first is just that, that pivoting in the LMS space. And I haven’t seen the most recent stats on this, but you’ve seen countless reports out there, John Leh from Talented Learning puts one out every once in a while, that just talks about the number of LMSs that are out there. And granted these LMSs is some of them are for higher ed, some of them are for sales enablement. Some of them are for our internal corporate l&d, but there’s by some counts, I think almost are over, at this point, 900 of them. So we’ve seen a proliferation in the market and now I think we’re starting to see tierpoint more segmentation.

So I’m curious like, if you’re thinking about, you know, investing in an LMS, for instance, or maybe if you’re talking to a founder of a new LMS company, how important do you think opportunities in the LMS space are going to be? And where do you see that segment going over time?

Eugene Lee  20:13

Yeah, I think it’s an interesting space. For the reason that you said that there’s 900, there’s no clear, clear, super clear winners in the space and they’re starting to become, you know, best and breeds of, you know, sales training, or potentially customer education, or, you know, on the HR side and compliance side, as you think of, you know, more traditional type LMSs, but I think your- you will, well, our hypothesis is that, you will start seeing some bundling across similar like categories, like I think, you know, this customer education and the internal LMS, there could be, you know, some some bundling there.

And so, I think that’s just a natural evolution of time, where not just an LMS, but in a lot of categories, you see, bundling to re bundling to, or sorry, the unbundling, to bundling, to bundling back again. And so I think we’re probably going to see this, you know, pendulum kind of swing back where there might be bundling across-, driven by some-, you know, recent kind of events, such as COVID, you know, people are starting to cut costs a little bit, or really look at the p&l to, to, you know, figure out how to how to get through COVID and evaluate the proliferation of SaaS tools that have happened over the last however many years. And so why do I need? If I’m a CFO, why do I need, you know, three LMSs? If I look at, you know, what tools were using?

And so, some of these might solve a similar use case. So do we consolidate to one that hopefully is, you know, pretty good in all three, all three aspects. And so I think from in terms of opportunities in LMS, space, I think you’re seeing, you know, customer education are kind of the external LMS was what I call it, your, you still have the internal LMS for training, whether that’s, you know, the sales training or, you know, teams training, and then I think you’ll you might see, you also see, you know, the LXPs out there in terms of those learning platforms for, you know, continuing education or continuous, you know, learning and development to help- to help your teams.

And so I think, what you’ll see, I think, you know, you’ve also seen, like, over time, even even, you know, at least, you know, OMERS is, is traditionally- has traditionally been the Canadian focused fund before we moved out here to the Bay Area, and we track some of the Canadian companies like Docebo, and Docebo’s LMS use extended across at least two of the three of those LMSs the internal side of the external side. I think there’s another one that’s up and coming like work ramp who I think just launched, you know, an external customer education, but they’ve also built the internal side. So I think you’re starting to see some of these earlier stage, you know, companies think about the horizontal play versus kind of the best in breed play that’s happening.

Adam Avramescu  23:26

Yeah, it’s, it’s interesting to see with, you know, both of those examples, for example, Docebo, you know, starting for the the internal, more l&d focused use case and start to build out towards customer education and some of the other related segments and now yeah, now they show up in deals all the time, right, when you’re evaluating a customer education platform, and yeah, WorkRamp, similar, right, started with from a sales enablement space, and is now moving into external.

I wonder, like, if I were if I were starting an LMS platform tomorrow for some reason. Is there more opportunity… And I don’t know, I don’t know if there’s a straightforward answer to this. I’m just kind of thinking out loud. Is there more opportunity in starting from an external use case and building something that’s really simple, but the customer focused and then building the internal pieces, or starting from an internal perspective and then trying to solve customer education afterwards? I don’t know if you’re seeing any of that in the market.

Eugene Lee  24:29

Well, I mean, I think you mentioned one: WorkRamp, that went from the sales enablement to launching a customer education side this year, I think earlier this year. I think the other example would be Skilljar. Right? I think they’re one of the better ones on the external side. There’s also there’s plenty of other ones like Thought Industries and Intelum and whatnot. That are squarely focused on the external side. And I think from what I hear they’re- all of them are getting great traction, not just because they’re probably executing very well. But I think for some of the points that we’ve highlighted earlier, I think it’s just a trend that’s happening where, you know, this is a strategy again.

I think, to your question on which one’s right to start; I don’t- I don’t know, because I think you’ve seen success, I just listed off a couple successes on both sides, I think it’s all about building the right product. That’s easy to use, that’s got great features that solves real, real pain points, potentially in different ways. You know, they some of the ones that I’ve listed are probably solving them in different ways. But it’s really catered towards the end user. And I think that’s what we look for from a company perspective is, you know, great teams, building great products for great, you know, hopefully customers and using them in a way that they love their products. And we’re solving real, real pain points, because I think there are pain points across the stack.

I think the strategy or maybe the question is, do you stay in one? Or do you evolve that to both sides? You know, the SKilljar or Thought Industries ultimately come over to the internal side? At some point in down the road? Or do they stick out? Just the, you know, on the external side? I think that’s probably the more potentially more interesting question. I think my belief is that I think if you look at the details of the wars, who are having great success, or you mentioned work ramp in terms of, you know, the, the both sides of the house.

I think, in light of COVID and what I described of CFOs looking at, you know, the p&l, I think even from a user perspective, the the horizontal approach of having both sides, somewhat benefits where we’re heading, at least our opinion is just because it’s a single UI. People, the end users are familiar with, you know, one product versus I need to log into multiple products with learn and train on two different products. Hopefully, they’re all easy to use in general. But you know, you still have to go through that that onboarding process for for both. And so there’s a little bit of a trade off and convenience of, you know, the single platform. And going back to that, you know, bundling that I had mentioned, mentioned earlier, and so, you know, we’ll see how it all plays out. But I think it’s an interesting question for sure.

Adam Avramescu  27:43

Yeah, I want to pull on that thread a little bit more. Because it’s, it’s such an interesting question. When you think about, there’s a tension, there’s an inherent tension to deciding you know, how horizontal you want to go in terms of the markets you serve. Because at a certain point, you’re- yes, you will limit yourself by building exclusively say, for a partner audience, or for a customer audience or for an association audience. And that’s why so many of these, these companies are starting to build either parallel products or just expand their use cases, like Thought Industries, for instance, moved from more of the association and professional learning world into customer education.

But you have to balance that at the same time with you know, if you if you’re serving everyone, then you’re you’re kind of building for no one. So for all these companies, and we’ve, we’ve been talking to a lot of their CEOs on on the air, just really thinking about who their target audience is and who they’re building for, is so important to preserving that user experience and making sure that their features resonate.

So when you when you talk about bundling, I kind of want to pull on that thread a little bit more, because one other area where I’m starting to see it, is sort of like what when, when I was at Optimizely, what we did at optiver is where we had a kind of a federated Help Center, LMS, community, we had in product education built in, and they were different systems that were kind of skinned to look similar to each other, but still had a lot of underlying, you know, integration challenges, identity challenges, SSO was was a big issue.

So I’m just curious, are you seeing any activity there or interesting approaches to creating more bundled customer education suites that don’t necessarily just go across those horizontals but maybe even go across those different modalities?

Eugene Lee  29:20

Yeah, I mean, I think the most- the category that I could see, kind of going into each customer education or the other is, we mentioned the digital adoption platforms and the onboarding, like the WalkMe’s or Pendo’s of the world. And how that- is that is if you think about onboarding in this in product adoption, is that similar to customer education, because you’re educating, you know, certain steps to partake, you know, as you as you go through?

Now, I think, you know, some of the traditional customer education companies like Skilljar and Thought Industries that at least the two that we’ve we’ve mentioned. They’re not there they they’ve taken a different approach right through through courses and, and through certifications. And from that perspective, but I could see that in the future where those two could potentially blend in either customer education going into those digital adoption platforms, or vice versa. So that that would be the one that I think they’re the most similar use cases of, we’re just sticking in, you know, customer education and customer success.

I want to go back to one of the things he took on the bundling. And, and you know, how the table has gone down in added external learning? I mean, you’ve seen it on the sales side, too, right? In terms of some of these categories of sales enablement, and sales engagement, they’re all feature creeping each other, right. And so they’re all expanding, trying to expand those use cases, because there’s, they’re not stuck, but they- they’ve been focused on on sales.

And so how do you continue to grow the market or, or add new customers to what they’ve that they’re originally selling? So I think it’s just a, it’s, you’re going to see some of this consolidation on the sales side, especially but then on the customer education side, I think you could see it on the on the customer education and and then on the LMS side, as well, as we mentioned before,

Adam Avramescu  31:32

Yeah, I think it’ll be really interesting to see where those markets go, because you’re right, LMSs are enjoying kind of a new, a new life and a new vogue, because of, you know, the the shift towards online learning. And also, I think towards the kind of the proliferation of, of a skills economy, I think a lot of LMSs and anyone in general who supports the certification space is seeing increased importance on the ideas of building, building and credentialing skills.

And then at the same time, digital adoption platforms are really gaining a lot of traction, because, I mean, I remember when they first started to come out. And even though the idea of performance support in a product isn’t exactly new, the fact that these digital adoption platforms were coming to prominence, it sort of seemed like the holy grail at the time, like, oh, if we’re in the business of educating our customers, what better place to bring our customers then then in product and educate them in the product, while they’re using it. I think the trade off there, it comes down to what I what I would call surface area, you only have so much space to educate a customer on something within the space of the product. So you kind of need both, and I would I, like you, would be really interested to see, you know, if there is kind of a single company or single suite that really tries to solve both of those.

Eugene Lee  32:45

Yeah, I think I would also say that on the, you know, you mentioned surface area, as either call it a not- I don’t wanna say it’s a limitation, but just it’s a it’s one medium, right, I think, you know, what you’ve seen on the customer education, customer-, you know, this is digital adoption, you know, for the pendo’s, and the onboarding, and the product and product stuff. I think on the customer education side, there is a little bit of that, because some of those customers are in, you know, have digital platforms. But I think that on the customer education side, you can also think of it as, you know, offline customer education, too, right? And so like, not everyone has to not everyone’s businesses and so called internet business, right? So how do we use customer education into the larger potential market? Or the or LMS? Right, in terms of learning and scaling? You’re not just learning to do your job?

For what me and you do, from a, you know, call it “tech perspective”. But there’s plenty of other jobs where customer education or internal LMSs in trainings where that is, it is a factor. And so does that open up a whole new world? And maybe there isn’t console, maybe it’s Skilljar or, you know, Thought Industries doesn’t have to, you know, go to the internal side, or, or to the digital adoption side, because they’re servicing customers that are just non tech. Right, too.

And so, I think- I think that’s what’s exciting about this, this category, call it customer education, customer success, even kind of, you know, a little spin on the LMSs. Is that the application and use cases are there, they’re profound. Right? And so, I think it’s just all about finding the, again, for us, the right founders, the right companies that are solving the, you know, the pain points that potentially have, you know, what I just said is a big market.

Adam Avramescu  34:42

Yeah, I think that’s an incredible point. When I think about the trajectory of customer success, you know, a lot of that came from software products, right? Like Salesforce is one of the earliest companies really building a formal customer success practice, but it’s not like the idea of account management, for instance, was new, there were companies in the offline space doing that already. But then they’ve been absorbing ideas from the tech companies, you know, through this new lens of customer success.

And so something similar could happen with customer education, where it’s not like the idea of customer training, customer documentation, all of that is new. It’s not like it hasn’t existed in the offline space. But you’re starting to see some companies in non tech industries starting to take some cues from Tech, because it’s helping to make them more agile and more efficient at what they do. So I think I think we’ll continue to see that just like you said.

Eugene Lee  35:37

Yeah, absolutely. Especially during, you know, the time and the pandemic that we’re in now, where, in some of these cases, training, whether internal or external, might have been on site, right? And now you if you want to, you got to be, you know, socially distanced, or at least doing them online, right, to do the training. So what are those delivery mechanisms? Now? And I think that’s, that’s just another trend that kind of reinforces why, you know, this is such an interesting area.

Adam Avramescu  36:10

Absolutely. So I’m gonna ask you two questions, related to advice. And the first thing I want to ask you is, you know, if you’re talking to all the potential founders out there, I know we have some founders and early stage companies who listen to the podcast. What advice do you have, for, you know, a founder, who is maybe starting a company in the customer education or customer success or post sale space? And, you know, they’re hoping to get an investment in the future? Well, what would you recommend they think about? it?

Eugene Lee  36:42

This is a pretty general, pretty general question. I think, in terms of like, I would think if you’re just starting off, I would think about what’s what’s a pain point, whether it’s customer education, or customer success, that is the biggest pain point that just hasn’t either been solved by, or most likely solved by technology- hasn’t been solved by technology, whether you had to throw more people at it to fix it. And so is that some sort of automation or workflow? Or is it a medium for what we kind of just talked about from a customer success? A customer education perspective? I think it’s just finding what are those the biggest pain points that haven’t been solved or have been solved very poorly.

And really a for my advice is, how do you solve it for the end user, don’t solve it for the manager, or for the VP or for the CEO. Like solve that pain point for who those frontline you know, CSM or customer education folks that are, you know, going and talking to the customers like, what are their pain points? So that’s where I would at least start and then maybe you grow your pie, you know, from there, but what are those, because I think there’s still so many pain points that just haven’t been talked about as much as you know, on the sales side. We’re at the, just the beginnings and as this thing continues to evolve, you know, whether, you know, you consider account managers on on the CSI or, you know, support or there’s so many factors where there’s just a lot to be hopefully, you know, created over the next several years.

Adam Avramescu  38:30

Yeah, I think there’s a ton of opportunity in front of us. And that actually kind of brings me to my last question about advice. And bear with me, Eugene, we’re taking the bow tie model to this conversation, this might be even more general question. What we think about the fact that this space is continuing to grow, and we have more people, more new people coming into customer success than there ever have been, more new people coming into customer education, some of them coming from customer success, then there ever have been. I guess, what advice or perspective, would you give someone who is new to the customer success or customer education space? 

Eugene Lee  39:08

Yeah, I mean, I think one, I think the number one advice is I would quite honestly talk to people like you Adam, and create that community and and network system within CS professionals, customer education professionals, because I think it’s still relatively early, where people are still figuring out what those best practices are. I think a lot of people have ideas and frameworks, whether it’s the bow tie or you know, some other flair framework or, you know, CF strategy of, you know, strategic accounts or selling one to many like I mean, I think people kind of understand these concepts and- or they’re starting to understand them, but I don’t think they’re talked about as much as other functions.

And so it’s finding that if you’re starting off in these functions, as finding that network to learn from each other, and help share problems and seeing what there’s, you know, what we’re seeing versus what you’re seeing, because I think CS and customer education, you know, at the SMB level, to the mid-market level, to the enterprise level are all different. And they’re all different mechanics. And so, and I don’t think we talk about them as much as we do on the sales side. there’s plenty of stuff that’s written on, on, you know, on the sales, even if you are a large company to a one person, I’m still the CEO, founder selling, right? And so I just think, finding that network and starting those conversations was only going to benefit, you know, the industry as a whole, or the function as a whole or functions as a whole.

Adam Avramescu  40:53

I couldn’t agree more. And that’s part of why Dave, and I do this show, it’s, it’s really, you know, we started doing this as an effort to find the others in our community. And that’s why we really enjoy hearing all sorts of perspectives from practitioners, from leaders, from CEOs, and now from investors as well. So, Eugene, thank you so much. I really appreciate you coming on the show today and giving your perspective.

Eugene Lee  41:16

Yeah, thank you for having me. It was it was a it was great chatting, and hopefully I I shared some helpful information and how we think about things here at OMERS.

Adam Avramescu  41:27

Yeah, I think it’s super valuable advice for folks who are tuning in and may or may not have heard the investor perspective yet. Now speaking of learning, if you, listener, want to learn more, we have a podcast website at customer.education. Not sure how we snag that URL, but we always appreciate it. There you can find show notes and other material. I am @avramescu on Twitter. Eugene can people find you anywhere?

Eugene Lee  41:53

You can find me on on Twitter or LinkedIn. It’s just the end of the URL is Eugene JY Lee. Or I think at LinkedIn, it’s Eugene L. And so please ping me any way that you can’t have been answering questions or help out?

Adam Avramescu  42:11

Excellent. Maybe one of those things will turn into you know, the next portfolio company and the customer success or customer education space. I can’t wait to see who who comes on board next. Absolutely. And listener, if this helped you out, you can help us out by subscribing and Apple podcasts, overcast Stitcher, Spotify wherever fine podcasts are sold. Leave us a positive review on Apple podcasts, that helps the most. And thanks for joining us. Go out and educate, experiment and find your people. Thanks for listening