Adam Avramescu: [00:00:00] EV every time I see the title of our podcast, I think about the song from Sealab:2021 underneath
Dave Derington: [00:00:07] the sea.
Adam Avramescu: [00:00:11] Like it’s in my head constantly. Hey everyone, Adam, here from the CELab podcast, I’m proud to announce that I’ve just released a new book. It’s called customer education. Why smart companies profit by making customers smarter? You can actually find it now on amazon.com in ebook or in print format.
you could also do blt.ly slash customer education made you a easy little Bitly link. So I’d really appreciate it. If you pick a copy up and let me know what you think. Thanks everyone.
Dave Derington: [00:00:51] It’s December 4th, 2018. And welcome to episode nine of CELab, the customer education lab, where we explore or how to build customer education programs, experiment with new approaches and exterminate the myths and bad advice that stopped growth dead in his tracks. I am Dave Derington
Adam Avramescu: [00:01:08] and I’m Adam from.
All right. Dave, we’ve talked about a number of topics. we started with our first steps and when all the way to picking and choosing an LMS. So now it’s time to go back to basics and to the core of what any customer education professional needs to start their journey.
Dave Derington: [00:01:26] Great. So I know from previous podcasts that you’re going to want to see some numbers on this one.
Aren’t you?
Adam Avramescu: [00:01:32] Hey, spoiler alert.
Dave Derington: [00:01:33] All right. not actually. Okay. Let’s
Adam Avramescu: [00:01:35] let’s just do this one by gut.
Dave Derington: [00:01:37] Cool do it.
Adam Avramescu: [00:01:39] Oh no. let’s jump in. Let’s hear some numbers. Okay.
Dave Derington: [00:01:41] So we know that one of the heart hard won lessons that I’d venture to say, you and I have both experienced, and I’m emphasizing this in bold.
You could see it in bold, my voice, the hard way, right? How to estimate the time it takes to develop great content. And I think in fact it’s probably one of the earlier episodes or something you and I have talked about in passing.
Adam Avramescu: [00:02:08] It was one of our first three. We talked about this.
Dave Derington: [00:02:10] Yeah. think about this.
I went up and I went to the ATD, the association for talent development site, and we’ll put a link in the notes, but there was a really great survey from 2017 that they pulled together. And you can’t see it on the screen here because we didn’t have a screen up. We’ll put it in there now. It’s but it showed the different modalities of training.
The live instructor led traditional type where you’re sitting in a classroom. and then it starts getting into. E-learning instruction based off of, digital means. Now let me just run the numbers real quick. So traditional, that means button to see a classroom style on average for one hour. Of content that I’ve been through delivering, you’re looking at about 38, almost 40 hours.
Is that, does that resonate with what you have seen in the past? Adam,
Adam Avramescu: [00:03:00] what a week of work that, that feels about, right? Yeah.
Dave Derington: [00:03:01] We can work. Yeah. All prepped people say, what are you spending your time on? I gotta get ready. Okay. Now contrast that with live virtual. some more virtual instructor led training.
Okay. We can get down to about 28 hours now. That’s, three quarters ish of. Of what you do for a traditional type class. And then it goes up from there. So if you’re wanting to get an e-learning and I know I’m a, I’m reading a book on this right now, where it gets into the different kinds of e-learning, one where I’m just doing like this I’m reading, I’m showing a screen, that’s not too much more, that’s like passive learning.
But if you go to the high end where you’re doing some really complex quizzing, all that stuff, it’s real time I’m working in an environment. You can call up into the, mid hundreds per hour or more. And I’ve just, I’ve seen it go even higher than that.
Adam Avramescu: [00:03:50] it takes a long time to get, right.
Dave Derington: [00:03:52] Yeah. And I know you’ve even said this before the technologies and the things that we’re starting to see out in the environment that we can use are starting to accelerate this a little bit, but I would venture to say, that’s going to have a point of diminishing return.
there’s always going to be a hard one number that it’s going to take me probably less time to do a live or virtual instructor led. class, okay. let’s get into our hypothesis.
Adam Avramescu: [00:04:18] Cool. based on that, it sounds like maybe we can test this hypothesis the best way to start developing your customer education program is to leverage virtual instructor led training.
All
Dave Derington: [00:04:30] So like unlike the last episode, this is an affirmation. Yes. I think we would say when she agreed that virtual instructor led training is one of the best ways to get started
Adam Avramescu: [00:04:42] and by get started, what do you mean? Do you mean piloting content before you’re ready to turn it into something more scalable?
Dave Derington: [00:04:47] Yeah. let’s break this down. we’ve we thought there were a few points, but yeah. What’s your first, what is your mission when you’re starting out and I’m speaking to you, the early phase customer education professionals somewhat, and you might even be the leader you’re. Building a program. There’s nothing.
and yeah, some saying this is a great way to pilot and get that initial content and start yeah. Working from there. Sound good?
Adam Avramescu: [00:05:13] Yeah, that sounds great. So tell me more why VILT as a way to do that?
Dave Derington: [00:05:18] Okay. we’ve already started, we’ve already seen the numbers, from the ATD data alone. And, I would say from my own practical experience, and I’ll leave you to tell me what you’ve experienced.
Yeah. It takes less time overall to get into deliver that initial content. Meaning I could say if you’re saying 28 hours for one hour training, that’s about right. it’s like a 30, 30 hours, not quite all of my week. so say Adam, you come to me and say, Dave, Hey, we’ve got to do a new class on this topic.
And I go, okay, I’ve got to go and ask people questions. I’ve got to get the material together. I’ve got to create a slide deck. I hate slide decks. I’ve got to do some tests and exercise and. Great. I can do it in about this amount of time and that’s one hour training. Cool. Got it. But why VILT is a couple of things.
One, you can sit down and quickly test and you can iterate, meaning, lay it all out, get it in some kind of semblance of order. And then that first time you go do it. I would generally say that I always put beta on this. I go, Hey customers, I’ve got a new class. It’s totally beta. I’m just going to get it out there with.
an expectation, a hope, a prayer that you’re going to cut me a break on this, and then in exchange for that, and often I’ll offer that free. I get feedback plus the in VIT VILT it means virtual meaning I don’t have to get people together. I just send out a meeting invite and go to meeting or something and rock and roll.
Let me think about that.
Adam Avramescu: [00:06:46] Yeah, I think that’s great. the hardest parts about putting together courses, a lot of the time are. If you’re doing e-learning, it’s the amount of production that goes into it. And if you’re doing a classroom course, it’s the logistics to get people into the classroom. So VILT strikes a happy medium.
I also think a lot about development methodology here. So you’re reading the Michael Allen book right now, right?
Dave Derington: [00:07:07] Absolutely. It’s an amazing book. Yeah. So
Adam Avramescu: [00:07:09] Michael Allen is also a strong proponent of. Moving away from the traditional development model for courses, which was called ADDIE. And there, it was like a waterfall process where you’d go through analysis.
And then when that was done, you do design and then you do development and then you do implementation and then evaluation. And that worked okay a long time ago, but it doesn’t really reflect how content is put together today. And I can guarantee you two things. One that the content you put out the first time is not going to be the right or the final form of the content.
and that once you release it’s going to change pretty frequently. So what better way? Is there to put it out there then by beta and get in front of your actual customers so you can get feedback.
Dave Derington: [00:07:51] Absolutely. And for reference, and we’ll put this in the show notes. This is Michael Ellen’s guide to e-learning.
I have the second edition and ironically, this was put out by the ATD press and that’s where those numbers just came from a wildly is the, the publisher. So check that book out. That’s definitely going in my library and there’s some incredible tips in there.
Adam Avramescu: [00:08:10] Yeah, they do. They do a lot of Michael Allen’s publishing.
He also wrote a book called leaving ADDIE for Sam. That actually talks about the difference between the ADDIE methodology and something that’s more rapid development.
Dave Derington: [00:08:20] Fabulous.
Adam Avramescu: [00:08:22] Yeah. Yeah. okay. So what, if we’re going to do our VILT is we’re committed. That’s a good thing to do. what are our options for putting them together?
Dave Derington: [00:08:29] Okay. Let’s make this a little bit more interactive discussion because again, you and I, what we have, we’re kindred spirits and, but we also see different things. So let’s talk about two different approaches. Number one, the entry point. okay, here you are. First time ever. You’re doing an doing a course.
Do you have a budget? I don’t know. but what as an entry point you’re going to be looking for is any kind of technology you can use to one invite people and run to run a meeting. Okay. That’s a low barrier of entry. What I mean by that is, Hey, off the shelf. zoom, you can get a free account. A goo Google has some products to do that.
Google Hangouts has always been pretty cool. and. Commonly free or your organization may have Google apps for business, which is just part of that.
Adam Avramescu: [00:09:16] I think they’re getting rid of their free one next year. Yeah. I said getting weird, getting
Dave Derington: [00:09:20] rid of it, getting rid of it, Elmer Fudd
Adam Avramescu: [00:09:22] they’re getting rid of it.
Dave Derington: [00:09:23] Yeah. and then go to meeting and it doesn’t really matter if it’s something that you can rely on that works pretty well. if you’re restricted, use what you got. Okay. And so what do you think about that? Would you affirm that or you have some challenges for us, you
Adam Avramescu: [00:09:38] know, how photographers say the best camera is the one you have with you?
I think this is true for virtual training too. It’s the best VILT platform is the one that your organization already uses because frankly, there’s a lot of different options and a lot of different ways. To do this in the market. Yeah. but chances are you already have something that your organization uses either for your own meetings or for client meetings?
or, ideally your marketing team might actually have something that they use to do webinars. Oh yeah. And if you’re using one of those, then that’s a great place to start. Don’t worry too much about how you’re going to rigorously collect the data and what systems it’s going to integrate with and all that stuff.
You’re just experiment.
Dave Derington: [00:10:17] Yeah. just do it to start working and then. if you start getting a budget, I would encourage you to start thinking about, products that are more akin to customer education. Those would be like I’ve used GoTo training in the past earlier. Like it, it has a lot of super cool features in it.
Like I can do quizzes, I can do polls. I can, basically capture all that information. Know who’s there. See how engaged they are.
Adam Avramescu: [00:10:39] Adobe can, man. I still want to fight you on that, but I know we only have so much time.
Dave Derington: [00:10:43] No, you have a minute. what’s your fight point? I
Adam Avramescu: [00:10:47] I’ve actually had a lot of problems using the GoTo suite and my apologies to anyone from Citrix who’s listening right now.
but the user experience a lot of the time is not always reliable. it can be a bit of a clumsy experience for learners, and I’m not trying to single go-to out on this. I think a lot of online meeting platforms have this, but to me it feels like, go to training compared to. Go to meeting, which is a much more robust product is just lacking a lot of the features and like a really good customer experience.
Dave Derington: [00:11:20] Yeah. frankly, go to meeting or go to training is one of the things that I really started to get away from those platforms on, because there’s things I wanted to do, like track, like automatically get quiz, it’s good. It’s good enough. Let’s just say that it’s good enough. Adobe connect.
I had, I had a wonderful opportunity to do training at Adobe and it blew me away. I was like, wow, that’s really neat. Cause it could do all kinds of different things. But then again, there becomes a technological freight of having to understand how to do this, how to do that. Or they get started when it gets started with something, make it easy.
And I will add one of the things that you should good. Make sure you can record. Okay. Even if you’re not recording for somebody else and sharing it later, somebody is going to ask you for one, Oh, did you have a recording that I couldn’t make it. Okay. Sure. but for yourself, It’s such a good thing to be able to go back and look at your technique, or if you have a team member that you’re trying to develop, Hey, Jane, Jim, Judy, you’re doing trainings.
I want you to take a look at this and here and here, these are the things you can work on. one other thing that I want to interject in a, just wrote an article on this. And Adam, you’re probably tired of hearing about this, but, one platform that you may have heard of, if you’ve been in the gaming space is Twitch and why I bring this up.
Is there some stellar tools that can allow you to build pretty amazing, training, with, you’ve got chat, you’ve got everything, you’ve got recording capabilities and it’s free. don’t you think about.
Adam Avramescu: [00:12:48] I’m saying, wow, like I haven’t heard you talk about this. No, I’m not. I’m actually not tired of hearing you talk about this because I think sometimes as customer education professionals, we get locked into what are the established tools of the trade.
even though, you, I think you mentioned in your articles, they’re missing some things like registration, enrollment, tracking, polls, quizzes, password protection surveys. Like even though they’re missing some of those things that we would traditionally write into our requirements, if we’re willing to do some of those things.
In a different way. I love the idea of thinking differently with a platform that’s built to scale in a different way.
Dave Derington: [00:13:22] You should always be pushing the boundaries. And again, it’s about what works for you, but it’s also about what is less friction to your customer who doesn’t want to have to deal with, like to your point before, go to training for sometimes I had problems with logging in and somebody didn’t have info anyway.
Adam Avramescu: [00:13:41] you download the software and then audio is not working. And then and again, it’s not just go to a lot of them
Dave Derington: [00:13:45] have this broad of them have that problem
Adam Avramescu: [00:13:47] incredible. Or like audio clipping, things like that.
Dave Derington: [00:13:49] Totally. yeah, if you want to listen to that, R see that article, it’s a, there’s a link B I T dot L Y slash Twitch dash training.
So I’ve got that up. So you can take a look at that,
Adam Avramescu: [00:13:59] that in the show notes.
Dave Derington: [00:14:00] Totally.
Adam Avramescu: [00:14:02] me, I’m a skeptic. So let’s talk about some caveats and tips. what do you actually need to make sure you’re. Successful. And what do you look out for?
Dave Derington: [00:14:10] Okay. So this is a lot, like in the last session we broke things down to five different pieces.
I think we got about that many caveats and tips. let me bring in the first one. maybe we, tagging this and take turns. All right.
Adam Avramescu: [00:14:23] Like pro
Dave Derington: [00:14:24] wrestlers. maybe
Adam Avramescu: [00:14:27] can we need customer education, wrestler
Dave Derington: [00:14:30] names. Yeah. okay. Scheduling and communication is one of the first things I look for.
What do I mean by that? this is a talent and, I kinda, I like to call it crowd control and planning ahead. You’ve got to make sure that you’re. You have a plan way in advance of the training date? There is nothing worse than going. Oh, I’ve got to do this training. I haven’t sent out an announcement to everybody.
So you send out a haphazard email to the people that are on a list and hope they get it. They don’t. Did you include the link to the training, all that kind of stuff. you need to think ahead. So if you’re going to do training, I’d say it, them minimum a bare minimum a week. maybe even more, with reminders.
What do you think about that?
Adam Avramescu: [00:15:18] I think that totally makes sense. People always want to know what to expect and you need time to get people into the course, which brings me to the second one, which is marketing. You. You always have to ask the question if you build it, will they come? Yeah. So I always recommend working with marketing, or if you have a customer marketing team to figure out how it’s going to be promoted, who we’ll be on the invitation list.
if you’re sending it out to your broader customer base. or if not, do you have a specific list of people who are enrolled in your online Academy or just somewhere? Who are you going to send this to? I also think that especially if you’re working with a larger accounts or mid-market accounts, CSMs are your best friends here.
they love to have things that they can give to their customer. Yeah. they call them gifts sometimes. but best of all is if you can integrate this into your onboarding experience. So for instance, if you know you’re going to be doing, your product one Oh one. Webinars or your product?
One-on-one virtual trainings. I hate calling them webinars, but that’s a different pet peeve for a different time. it should be interactive and you should be able to set those expectations directly in your onboarding flow. So whether that’s the email that goes out when you’re onboarding with the customer, maybe it’s a CTA that you send out through your.
customer success platform, maybe it’s embedded directly in the product somehow with, with the digital adoption platform. You just got to find ways to set customer expectations about what these courses are when they are and get as many of them into it as we’ll benefit from
Dave Derington: [00:16:46] that’s Sage advice. if you build it, will they come?
Maybe not, unless you’re really pushing it. so let’s talk a little bit more now. Okay. We’ve got the invite out. We marketed and promoted this. Okay. Now it’s time. What do you do? and this is if you’re just starting out now, and again, I hope you take this into consideration. Adam fi Adam and I have learned some hard won lessons.
number one is I’d say, find a quiet place. If that means you need to work from home one day. Although I have a heater behind me that, tends to bother my, my. Speaking a little bit. I have a quiet place to go doing training in an open office type environment that just does not work. Why? some of my favorite companies it’s, somebody makes a sale, closes a deal and they ring the gong and, Oh my gosh, it’s madness.
And everybody’s what in the what’s going on? and it’s disruptive, even if it’s fun, it’s disruptive and too. Okay. So that’s a quiet place to is have the right equipment. Now it doesn’t mean you have to spend gobs of money at a bare minimum. You have your computer. And I would say have that hooked into a hardwired connection, not wifi because you know how that can go, have a phone failing that, with a good line.
I would invest in that phone or for your computer, a really great headset, like a Plantronics headset for your phone or your, microphone. Really nice one. I think what, you’ve got a blue Yeti.
Adam Avramescu: [00:18:14] I do. that’s a pretty common one,
Dave Derington: [00:18:16] pretty common one. I have, I have some,
Adam Avramescu: [00:18:18] you don’t like it?
Dave Derington: [00:18:19] No, that’s not whether I don’t like it or not. I just have some directional mic. I’ll send a link in the show notes, but, service rocket, bill Cushard had made a really nice article on how you can solve poor audio quality for less than 40 bucks. And I did it and it worked and it’s pretty tight.
So make sure you have that right equipment to run it right. Investing, even in a preamp, I have one called the focus, right? Fairly cheap. You get them used, makes, background noise, go away. so get all that together. Close your door, tell people that I’m going to be doing a training and please be quiet.
They might not listen to you, but good tips.
Adam Avramescu: [00:18:56] Great tips for sure. Okay. So now let’s, let’s talk about our favorite subject of the past couple of podcasts. Improv.
Dave Derington: [00:19:06] How do you, how
Adam Avramescu: [00:19:07] do you adapt on the, sorry? How do you adapt while you’re doing this training? how do you prepare for different questions and different problems that come up?
Dave Derington: [00:19:17] that’s tough sometimes.
Adam Avramescu: [00:19:20] yeah. What do you do, Dave?
Dave Derington: [00:19:21] for me, I definitely, I might even have a punch list of common questions. Now, if this was the first time you’re doing something you never, you’re not gonna know. but I try to think ahead, okay, I am w what happens. Oh, it’s this big technical system that I’m trying to train on.
How do I log in? Or how do I reset my password? Or, it’s those kind of a bleak or thug tunnel things, things that aren’t directly related to the training that you have, but are issues that are related that crop up.
Adam Avramescu: [00:19:50] Yeah. Especially if you’re doing in product demos and using sandbox accounts at Optimizely, we had a couple of training consultants who would run pretty similar virtual trainings.
And so we actually worked together to make. A checklist that they could use before each training. So every time they could make sure, okay. is this environment set up? Is this window open? Yeah. have I set these expectations at the beginning of the call? And then, one thing that I’ve seen a lot of teams do is they’ll seed sample questions in there.
if you have a system where people can submit private questions, you can always say, Oh, this question from the private chatter.
Dave Derington: [00:20:27] Yeah, totally.
Adam Avramescu: [00:20:29] And it’s actually one that you wrote.
Dave Derington: [00:20:30] Yeah. Yep. That’s really helpful because then it gives license to people to ask, like you’d said in a previous podcast, the dumb questions, they’re not dumb questions.
There’s, they’re important. All questions are important, but then
Adam Avramescu: [00:20:42] all questions are important and encouraging people to really put them out there.
Dave Derington: [00:20:46] Yeah, totally.
Adam Avramescu: [00:20:47] So as scar would say, be prepared.
Dave Derington: [00:20:51] speaking of be prepared, problems, what happens if your call drops? do what if somebody is, has I’ve had this one before, this was great.
I was in, on a phone or on a call. I was, facilitating it. And then all of a sudden my phone kept ringing off the hook and I finally put everything on mute and I opened my eye. Answered it. And it was somebody that was trying to get the link to the training, to be in the training. so think about those.
Like what happens when, if the power goes out, that’s happened multiple times, and ah, setting the expectations. Hey gang, if the, if it drops, just log back in, we’ll wait five minutes. We’ll get you back online.
Adam Avramescu: [00:21:30] yeah, you don’t want to let technical difficult. You don’t want to let typical, you don’t want to let technical difficulties catch you up.
Dave Derington: [00:21:36] No, and here’s one, that’s probably it’s common sense, but it’s one that if you’re like me and you’re out of time, most of the time you might be up burning the midnight oil, trying to get ready. you could do just be prepared in general. Anything can go wrong. The most important thing is that your customers have what they need.
They know how to get in and for you to be able to do that, to be adaptive, you probably need to get a good night’s sleep, eat something and take care of yourself.
Adam Avramescu: [00:22:10] I completely agree with that. all the research is starting to show that burning the midnight oil leaves you a cognitively in a really bad place.
Make sure you’re always getting a good night of sleep. not just before your virtual trainings.
All right. let’s do a couple more, so another great tip. Have a wing person. Oh, I love that. So yeah. when you’re doing a virtual training, your focus is typically going to be on actually delivering the content and answering the questions that are coming in. So it really helps to have someone who’s.
Helping other folks who can’t find the link or joined late. So they’re not being disruptive to the session. And similarly that might be someone who’s helping moderate questions coming in. If you have a really big group of participants.
Dave Derington: [00:22:58] Yeah. That’s really helpful. I’ve used that. there’s been cases where I haven’t had somebody and those are the cases where I was like, okay, I’ve got to put this on mute or whatever, but I really love doing virtual instructor led training and having that wing person that, that can say, Oh, Hey, there’s a really great question, Dave, can you hear here?
It is. Let me read it out loud. And they’re like, Oh, that’s awesome. Or they just tackle stuff in the wings and don’t, and let me focus. Okay. or
Adam Avramescu: [00:23:24] they’re just responding to people outside of the, The audio they’re there. They’re responding to people. One-on-one
Dave Derington: [00:23:29] yeah. That keeps things moving along.
Especially in virtual instructor, led training. You don’t want anything to take you off your cadence and like I found, and I’m sure you’ve experienced this. Yeah. Some, eventually something throws you usually it’s something that I didn’t expect, like we were talking about before or in that case where I’m really feeling bummed that somebody is trying to get in and they can’t, and I have to drop everything to help them.
He just doesn’t want that wing person can help obviate those questions and problems too. You
Adam Avramescu: [00:23:56] don’t want to be spending your time dealing with administration and technical difficulties and things like that when really the goal should be on focusing on the content and the facilitation, One company that I’ve seen do this really well is box.
So box has done a ton of public classes, and I think they were doing them all on any meeting for a long time. I don’t know if they still are. but at the time they were getting a lot of mileage out of that platform. And because they were using any meeting, they actually had a group chat and they had created a role.
It was a, not a full-time role, but it was a, I think a volunteer job that people could do. Called box specialist. And so if you were a support agent, or if you were in a customer success or marketing, you could be a box specialist and you would join in on these public classes to help moderate the chat.
And at certain points you would ask discussion questions to promote social learning right there in the chat. And I thought that was super cool. It’s
Dave Derington: [00:24:51] nice. I like that.
Adam Avramescu: [00:24:53] Yeah. All right. Bring it home, Dave, what happens after we’re done?
Dave Derington: [00:24:56] Okay. your job’s not done with virtual instructor led as much as anything else.
You need to be prepared to get feedback in the form of surveys. often I would like to have quizzes, which I’d actually run them at the end of my instructor, led classes. If I could just to, put a pin in it and say, Hey, I did this. Do you remember the things? Yeah. I for one, I’m not a big advocate of testing and quizzes.
I use them more for making sure to challenge people’s memory right in the moment, but they’re very helpful. And they’re another tool in your toolbox, then be prepared to do reporting. did everybody who was there? Did they participate? Did they ask a question? whatever you need to do.
and then you may need an admin to help, like that wing person could be helping with this stuff as you go, because there’s nothing worse than, Oh my God. I don’t remember who was on the call.
Adam Avramescu: [00:25:41] And yeah, what you don’t want to do is get into a point where you have a ton of customers who are going through this and you aren’t tracking it because at a certain point, you’re going to want to do reporting on, Hey, who are my trained customers and what happened to my train customers down the line?
Do they renew more? Do they expand more? Do they adopt my product more? And you won’t know that unless you actually know who was in your trainings. And if you’re doing self pace through an LMS, totally makes sense. You can do that really easily, but, in a VILT platform, It’s sometimes not being captured automatically.
So you want to make sure that you either have someone capturing it or that the system is reporting into your data warehouse or, your CRM or wherever you’re keeping all this stuff.
Dave Derington: [00:26:20] Yeah, totally. You may want to do like a checklist or something like that. Like you were talking about before. There’s another thing that you might not even be thinking about, particularly for those of us in customer education, a smaller company that’s growing.
I been all the way through the process to the end where you’re starting to look at, more standard conventional, service type training, engagements, and attribution to, I’m sure that’s the wrong word. revenue recognition. Is exceptionally important at that end, so that finance will come back and say, Hey, we had training in the plan for this.
And they paid for training. Can you demonstrate to me who took the training, what their scores were and when they took it. And so if you prepare now when you’re early and you have that in play, then down the road, the people in finance are going to love you for that, even though you’re not thinking about that right now.
Yeah. It was
Adam Avramescu: [00:27:08] like a revenue recognition issue with that.
Dave Derington: [00:27:10] Absolutely.
Adam Avramescu: [00:27:11] All right, Dave. So why don’t you, wrap it up with our call to action.
Dave Derington: [00:27:15] All right. so get your piece of paper out and a pencil or Evernote or whatever you want to do. One note, it’s fine. don’t need a template or anything. just a few bullets like you to sit down and challenge yourself to think about what you’ve got.
Are you just starting out? Have you done anything yet? If not think about a platform. free to paid. I don’t care. All you should care is, the points that we’ve listed before, does it do what you need to do? Does it meet your budgetary needs? Can a record. Those are really good things to do. Number two, plan out ahead, communicate, make sure that you have given yourself enough time and everybody knows what to do so that there’s no surprises and people get to your training.
That might even include marketing, et cetera. then delivery. This is where we talked about being prepared and the boy scout pledge, have a wing person make sure that there’s nothing getting in your way and you can focus on delivering that exceptional training that you, you wanted to begin with.
And then iterates. So these don’t completely match of what has that before, but they encapsulate the rest of them. Iterating means you’re going to be doing instructor led training. That’s the reason we like to do a virtual instructor, led training. You can loop quickly, I’m going to do it, and I’m going to do it again next month.
I’m gonna do it a month after that, That will give you feedback. If you’re pulling people and help you to improve. And at some point you might say, I’m done doing this. I’m going to put it in e-learning and look up, mr. Allen’s book and, make some great
Adam Avramescu: [00:28:38] stuff. Great. if you listener want to learn more, we do have a podcast website@customer.education.
no.org, no.edu it’s dot EDU, where you can find show notes. Other material, all the resources we talked about in this episode on Twitter, we are at CELab 11 that’s, C E L a B one one, because where number one, where number
Dave Derington: [00:29:06] one.
Adam Avramescu: [00:29:09] And I’m @avramescu on Twitter
Dave Derington: [00:29:10] and I’m @davederington
Adam Avramescu: [00:29:13] special. Thanks to Alan Koda for our theme music.
And if this helped you out, you can help us out by subscribing in your pod catcher of choice or leaving us a review on iTunes. Those two things really help and to our audience. Thanks for joining us.
Dave Derington: [00:29:26] Get out there and educate, experiment. Find your vehicle. Thanks everybody.
Adam Avramescu: [00:29:32] Thanks for listening.
Dave Derington: [00:29:36] Hi everyone, Dave here. From CELab podcast. If you’re finding value in this podcast, we’d really like to get to know who you are. So we’re going to ask you to click on our site and had yourself to our mailing list. We’re going to agree not to spam you, but at some point in the future, we may have special events, certain podcasts we want you to join on, or we might even throw in a class or two.
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