Adam Avramescu 00:00
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 on site. I’m Adam Avramescu.
Dave Derington 00:14
And I’m Dave Derington. Welcome, everybody. All right, what are we going to talk about today at him? I think this is the continuation of our book club so to speak.
Adam Avramescu 00:25
Yeah, and what better day to have a book club then on national tick tock day, who not not tick tock, tick tock as the top noise.
Dave Derington 00:39
Not like my obsession now. And I finally gotten into the Tick Tock culture.
Adam Avramescu 00:43
Oh, yeah. You know, neither dances to stop. Okay, well, okay. Because, because time is running out. So hopefully, that puts a pall of pressure over our entire episode today. But it’s also it’s also appropriate, because we are going back in time. And so the clock is winding back, once again, not to the year 1984. So we covered on a previous episode, we covered Claudia Guillard Meers, customer education, but from 1984. And now, we’re jumping forward in time, we’ve had 13 years, 13 years, many things have happened. empires have risen involved, and it’s now the year 1997. And we rejoined the state of customer education with strategies for customer strategies for effective customer education. by Peter Honebein.
Dave Derington 01:52
Gunner can’t even open it anymore.
Adam Avramescu 01:56
It’s like stuff, stuffed full of notes. But yeah, so we’re reviewing, we’re continuing our review of historical customer education books. And this is an interesting one, we’ll walk through it, but it’s a it’s interesting, first of all, to see like where the state of customer education is, in this book, because it’s evolved. But it still has, I think, quite a bit of continuity with what Dr. Amir described in a previous book. And, and yet, the angle that this book comes at it from is very different.
Dave Derington 02:33
It’s It’s refreshing, actually, it’s this one, I think, read a little bit easier. And I liked how it was structured, and it did a lot of trends. And there was, there were some more use cases or case studies in it. Plus, from a high level, what I really dug out about this just paging through again, and looking at my notes, there are some templates and methodologies in here that I’m going to be using, as I update my own strategic content. There’s great, this is a great book, there’s a great fun word. Yeah, there’s actually
Adam Avramescu 03:07
some like actionable tools. Where did I find it? I? I don’t know. I don’t know where I found this one.
Dave Derington 03:12
But I mean, it’s you don’t find a lot of books with customer education in the title. I was even skipping through the the notes in which Claudia’s book was the first reference if I looked at correctly, but not a lot of books out there that even reference customer education, I think we’ve had most of them now, your book? Yeah. Where is Claudius book, this book, maybe some topical papers or something? I know we had.
Adam Avramescu 03:39
There are some papers out there we did. We did one on the Super X. And then we also did, we didn’t there’s, there’s another paper that I read out there, that’s about customer education that maybe we can cover sometime in the future. But maybe it’s important to start here by the difference in positioning of the books, because the previous one was written more as let’s say, like an academic study on the state of customer education. Because her her thesis in that book was companies are doing this thing called customer education, and they’re putting money into it, but they don’t know what it’s called. And they don’t know that it’s this distinct practice. And so I think her her project was to find and define continuity between all these different fields of customer education.
Dave Derington 04:27
I to go along with that, and I would say basically, then we we as an industry, or a category, or what do we call ourselves a field, the discipline of practice, but all in all, I think now what that allows us to do is if I were to frame this up,
Adam Avramescu 04:47
take a drink. We pick it up everyone.
Dave Derington 04:52
I’ll say telemetry next. Oh, no.
Adam Avramescu 04:56
All right, we’re munging. Your catchphrases munging. Yeah,
Dave Derington 04:58
that’s three We pin down the date to the genesis of customer education to at least 1984.
Adam Avramescu 05:07
We in fact, can, I think dated a little bit earlier, because even in her book, she’s citing some earlier case, studies, like they weren’t books, but they were, they were studies of the customer education field, I think dating back even to the late 60s, early 70s. So now, it’s it’s 1997. Companies have kind of kept doing these, these similar customer education activities, but not necessarily calling them customer education, because now you have Peter homebuying, who is coming at this from a very different angle, he is writing this book for the American Marketing Association. And he is picking up on a similar hypothesis, which is that there are companies out here who are educating their customers. But his his project here is not the same as the other book, his project is less about trying to define and name what this field is, he’s rather observing that companies are doing this and companies are seeing benefits from doing this. So his project is more to give you a set of strategies that you can use to build your own customer education and practice similar to the companies that he’s profiling in this book.
Dave Derington 06:22
Yeah, I was just going back and looking through his the book matter and the front page. I like how this can I read this, because I think this helps frame up what we’re going to talk about. So Peter O’Brien says, ever tried to program a VCR or assemble your child’s play equipment. These are just two of hundreds of examples, frustrating, frustrating experiences that alienate customers from new products, and the customers that the companies that make them these products fail not because of poor quality, or because they can’t meet and even exceed customer needs, they fail because customers don’t understand how to get the benefits these products can deliver.
Adam Avramescu 07:07
You could say the exact same thing about software today. And hardware right customer exists for hardware today as well.
Dave Derington 07:15
Yeah, but But what I want what I wanted to make what I want to open space for here, and this kind of feel weird. The felt experience of customer education, to me has always been b2b SaaS and software and stuff. And now what what I feel like after reading the last book, and now reading this book, and thinking about the companies that we’re talking about in it, and the use cases that we’re talking about, it’s expanded the scope a little bit, it’s not just software.
Adam Avramescu 07:42
Yeah, b2b software is, is one form of customer education. And specifically, I think this kind of goes back to our hypothesis that we were getting at in the 1984 book, which is like, why, why was Why was there this momentum around naming the category customer education and describing this as a consolidated practice, and then like, kind of, by the time we got into this field, in, you know, various points in the 2000s, it had, like, people weren’t calling it that anymore, and it didn’t feel like it had continuity or, or continuity with the forms of customer education being described in these books, which are more like sales and marketing based. And I think, maybe part of that is related to the industry. So like a lot of what we see here, these customer education efforts, they are no longer gonna be labeled as customer education. For some of the industries that are being described, like some of the like consumer packaged goods, or like, financial retail, like, it’s just not being called customer education there anymore. Whereas in software, and specifically in SAS, we had a need to create a different way to educate our customers on the products that we have, because of the SAS business model. And because customers have to be constantly relearning how to use the product. So we kind of came up with not a new name for it an old name for it, we revived an old name for it to describe a different way of educating our practice our customers, which was, I think, standing in contrast, in some ways to both education services, which was tied to the idea more of like on prem software where you needed to make this strong investment in delivering services to your customers to have them be able to operate the software that they were learning how to use, but also in contrast, and I think this is kind of where we get back to this book to something like product marketing, which is I think, I think, I think what is being called customer education in this book, which has been primarily described as a a A marketing practice that ultimately yields customer service goals that I think became product marketing. And I was thinking about this, because my first job on the like, what my first job was working for, like an instructional design courseware vendor. But the first time I moved in house, I was thinking about this, I reported into a marketing org. And I forgot about that until I started reading this book. So actually, the idea of educating your customers on what the product is and how it works and how to use it, that actually has been considered a marketing function that never really went away. It’s just that now that SAS showed up, and customer success showed up, Customer Success kind of picked up the mantle of customer education functions, because it’s more tied to the idea of customer success and the ongoing renewal and net retention. And adoption. I don’t know we can
Dave Derington 10:59
we can we maybe we need to, apparently. But But yeah, let’s dive in. But I want I wanted to say this, that I feel like we’re still splitting hairs a little bit. And the more we do this research, and we think and we reconnect to our past, and we say, Well, what did we do? Oh, now this, I’m not gonna repeat what you said. But it’s customer education. It’s been here for a long time, we can call it product education, or product marketing or whatever. Like, it’s still all comes back to the fact that we’re all educating in the business. And then we’re
Adam Avramescu 11:33
never, it never truly it never truly went away. It just got aligned to different different parts of the org. And so people weren’t calling it customization the way that we call it customer education today.
Dave Derington 11:45
Yeah, and I will get into this, but I think that bothers me a lot. Because it bothers me in that we’re all doing the same kind of function yet. It’s like, you know, like, yeah, names. And we talked about this in a previous podcast, where, you know, what, what is the saying, A rose by any other name, you know,
Adam Avramescu 12:08
would smell as sweet. Yeah, but it’s Rose.
Dave Derington 12:13
Yeah, we call it something else. It could be product education, or product marketing, or customer enablement, or whatever the fact, I don’t want to belabor this, we talked about it before, but we’re now I’m calling this customer education. And I’m feeling like, we can actually bubble out a little bit more. Because like, and this is where I want to start with this to Adam. I’m working with people under the auspices of customer education, and not b2b SaaS, now. And it’s happening more frequently. And what the what’s what the the NIF difference in nuances and now in it, and let’s just say 2023, the time this airs, is that people are coming back to realize that the, we’re not coming back, they’re coming to us and realizing, Oh, you’ve kind of reinvented and nurtured all of this stuff, that we all know what it is. It’s new and not new. I keep saying that. And now we’re giving it a name. And now we’re expanding the practice. But we need to go back to our roots again and say, Okay, now let’s pursue this marketing aspect of it. Particularly. Yeah, this marketing blows up every time we have a discussion about marketing, in a good way. Yeah,
Adam Avramescu 13:23
yeah, that like, so Okay, so that was a good frame up, I think, now we’re ready to get into the book. Because really, the idea here is he’s describing customer education as a marketing function. But he describes a lot of the same goals, including like customer service goals, that that we think of today. And, specifically, one of the one of the things he starts with in the introduction is he’s describing a trend where he says more businesses are considering their customers, as learners. And he attributes that to the growing complexity of products in the market, as well as a few other trends. So this is this is kind of like where the book dates itself a little bit, and it doesn’t really do it that much afterwards. But he starts by talking about the days of writing for a product versus brochure are now over, because you can now log into the company’s worldwide web homepage, and get the knowledge you need at the touch of a key. So we’re at that point in history now, right, where things are actually coming online and you’re able to get information remotely. And because of that wealth of information, he says customers are getting smarter due to the information age, but and this is a quote, information alone is goal free. We must grapple with the information to make sense of it. Thus, customer education is about structuring the information so that it can be absorbed and applied.
Dave Derington 14:49
Or like that. Yeah, duration that grappling that. We’re Gosh, I wish I can remember the book that I read I’d add them. But it goes along with this evolution of an organization, the evolution of a business. And if I could do this as an audio podcast, think about a beginning of a company’s journey, and you have a big circle or an oval, and then you have little circles or ovals in that big circle, and they start to grow. So you have a seed of support in the seed of sales and a seed of marketing. And they start to grow to fill that space, which is the space, Problem Set space of your business. And that fluid around all of these bubbles, like support as a problem, because people call in and ask education questions or questions that could be solved by education, salespeople have the same problem. Support sucks, like, oh, it’s that support twice, but I was meaning professional services. There’s all this stuff that we that hasn’t been taken care of. And I like to say this kind of frames up as we’re looking, we’re perceptually changing our impression of a customer as a learner, not just somebody who’s paying us money, their learner first, wow, that changes the entire framework of how we pursue them, and we work with them and partner with them.
Adam Avramescu 16:15
That’s true. And it’s interesting to see him calling out these trends here in 1987, which like, these pretty much all come true to to varying capacities. So I’ll very quickly outline the ones that he talks about, he talks number one about the trend of the knowledge based business, so that it’s no longer just about delivering information to a customer. But rather that companies also have to be learning from customers and tailoring their solutions to them. So like, he gives an example of like a tennis racket that glows where the ball hit it. So you can, you can learn where you know how to how to play tennis better. But if you if you extrapolate that back to what we do in software, or even in hardware like this exists now this is what smart devices are. This is what CRM has helped us do. So we have continuity when we when we work with our customers, like we have all become learning businesses in the sense that we learn from our customers, and we retain that memory.
Dave Derington 17:11
We don’t often call it as such, though,
Adam Avramescu 17:14
right? We don’t. But it implies that businesses have to consider what customers want, like how they want to get value from your product and educate them on how to do it. So that kind of ties into Trend number two, which is he talks about the rise of solution selling and relationship marketing, which is the idea that customers don’t want products, they want solutions to problems that they’re having, which implies that we need to help customers make that solution work for them. And then the byproduct he calls out is that we form relationships with customers, once we’ve helped them solve their problems, that’s still true. Solutions solution selling is very much alive today. And those relationships
Dave Derington 17:49
have stemmed or have grown into what I would say is more customer success motions, right?
Adam Avramescu 17:56
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And like solutions, marketing exists as well, if you see it pre sales and post sales, but those should be working together. And then try number three is the one that I talked about earlier as kind of like making fun of the World Wide Web touch of a button thing. But basically, he’s calling out that now information is much more widely accessible. And we don’t need to rely on analog ways of delivering information to customers. So he calls out that increasingly expensive trainings with travel doing on site, all of that is already starting to decline, even in 1997 in favor of distance education is the term he uses for it. But we might call it now like remote or virtual. And also he calls out the dynamic that that creates more of an expectation that things are going to be updated in real time. It’s not like you update your brochure once a year. If it’s online, you can just update it. So this is something you didn’t really have to think about. You know, back in the Claudia GALLIARD mirror era. Yeah, and then trend for this is interesting, because I wasn’t really around for this one and didn’t really didn’t it never never fully clicked with me that this is how it used to be. But he calls out that companies have been downsizing their internal training departments in the 90s. Meaning that vendors are now responsible for doing the training of customers on their products. And it didn’t occur to me that that’s actually something that would have lived in internal training. Previous to this, because you would have built expertise internally on how to use these products, or how to operate them and train your own staff on them. Yeah, now like those those l&d people are being let go. And the vendors are responsible for training the customers to be successful
Dave Derington 19:44
in that time periods, but
Adam Avramescu 19:45
you’re talking about in that time period? Yeah. Yeah.
Dave Derington 19:48
I mean, like this first, so many things that I want to talk about today, but in that time period, yeah, this was it was really fun because I was reading this book and it was going back in time. Big because I’ve been there all along, when I worked at a get used to work at a company called Mallinckrodt pharmaceuticals, and I was the manager of the technical computing group at the time, my job was to help implement and adopt software’s like in the we call them, management execution systems, and laboratory manage laboratory Management Systems Laboratory, you know, they would do the data, it was equivalent of an LMS for almost the same thing. And the funny turn the fun transition in so I got to say this, because it helps, in my mind, at least frame up the discussion we’re going to have, I remember being in that era where I was working in a laboratory and using these very sophisticated applications. Software was my life every day. I mean, I did more software work than I did lab work.
Adam Avramescu 20:48
And I do so you probably had one of those certs that said, software is life, the rest is just details.
Dave Derington 20:56
But then I went work for a software company around 2002. And in that whole area, it had been okay, get the manual. While we don’t have updated training, there wasn’t anything online to the end of that short stint of time in the early knots. I was in an organization when we were doing that exact thing, updating the documentation. And the documentation was on a CD that we had to master and send with the software, which in my tenure, converted to a website, or a knowledge base that we didn’t have, which during my tenure we built and we built a community out of it. And all these things were just kind of like, I don’t even know how to describe it’s like the self replicating like this thing kind of creating itself. And now you have this whole virtual online, like this new form of education evolving from that era. It’s fascinating.
Adam Avramescu 21:51
Which, yeah, I think now takes us then into his he has a whole chapter defining what customer education means, in this time period. So do you want to take us into that Dave? Like he defines it, right?
Dave Derington 22:05
Yeah, yeah, we’re so let’s get into defining customer education. And chapter two, I like to think about this is that it’s a glue for our business. The quote from the book is, customer education is not an event, it is a process. It exists throughout a customer’s relationship with your company before, during, and after the sale. And I think that’s a great place to start with us. Wow, that’s a different kind of, I like how you start off with what it is not. But I like not,
Adam Avramescu 22:41
like we say this too, right? Like customers, we say it’s like it’s not an activity, it’s a function.
Dave Derington 22:46
Function. It’s a, it’s an act, it’s, you know, all the things that go together to help our customers connect with and get to the answers that they’re looking for. And that last and matter over time.
Adam Avramescu 23:00
Yeah. And so he’s kind of like linking as well, like strategically, he situates customer education kind of within marketing, but affecting sales and ultimately support because he kind of talks about it narrowing the gap between the customer’s knowledge about your product and actually like selling the product that being like the pre sales function, but also then supporting proper usage of the product, which builds customer loyalty. And so then, then then he defines it right? So he says, he starts with the anti definition. It’s not it’s not an event, it’s a process. But then what is it actually he says, customer education is the process by which companies systematically share their knowledge and skills with external customers to foster the development of positive customer attitudes? Hmm, what do we draw from that? It’s a process. It’s systematic. It’s about taking a company’s knowledge and skills and sharing it with customers to yield positive customer attitudes. So you’re gonna see the effect being on like, CSAT, customer loyalty, sentiment,
Dave Derington 24:09
retention, churn,
Adam Avramescu 24:11
all that kind of stuff. Yeah. So it’s interesting. It’s like it’s a directional definition. And I kind of I was thinking about like, the Claudia guard mirror definition from her book. And I’m actually I’m looking at at that one. This is the 1984 book, she says, she defines it as any purposeful, sustained and organized learning activity that is designed to impart attitudes, knowledge or skills to customers or potential customers, by a business or industry, which is a more all encompassing definition. And it’s less directional. It’s but like, what they have in common, is they’re both talking about imparting knowledge and skills or sharing knowledge and skills from a company to a customer. And it can be pre sales or post sales. But I think I like honed by its definition better, because because it has like a result attached to it. Even if we wouldn’t say that that result is kind of in our in our definition that we use today.
Dave Derington 25:05
Yeah, I also like he was talking about the the audience, which is, I think you’ve actually said it, but I want to put it in a different way. He cites resellers, buyers and users, which these days I think more about our customers or product users. But when you’d say user, it’s more inclusive, right? When I say customer, I mean, a user, I, a customer can be an internal employee, it could be a partner, it can be a customer, it can be anybody, a customer software, it’s, I think it actually is better than the word user. Because now we’re thinking Tron.
Adam Avramescu 25:47
Well, we also have, we have this issue where we say customer and customer can mean an account, which contains multiple users in different roles. And also can contain buyers and like users. And then we can say customer, and we can actually mean like a human who is doing something at the company that is buying software from you. Correct. And this kind of this gets a little bit sticky and nasty. When you start thinking about like, Sales Lead growth versus product lead growth, like who is the user? And how are you? Sorry, who is the customer? And how are you educating them actually becomes a really pivotal question. So we do an episode in the future that’s on that topic. And I really like to, you’ll see, well, like where, where this where this complicates. But anyway, like, but he’s talking about as a marketing tool, I think that’s interesting.
Dave Derington 26:41
Yeah, I think it’s really interesting, because I’m trying to gather my thoughts here. The more remember, we went, the last time we did it, again, I think you’d let him with us, we did this whole recording, we were trying to cover all of the different parts of the customer lifecycle, starting with stuck on marketing, we did two episodes on that, and then it exploded is one of the most popular episodes ever. And I think that’s because
Adam Avramescu 27:08
it was, it was the fifth most popular episode of last year. I don’t know if that’s like the most popular ever, but it
Dave Derington 27:12
was one of a very,
Adam Avramescu 27:15
very particular meaning.
Dave Derington 27:16
But when we talk about marketing periodically, it is popular. Sure, because marketing, I’ve always felt like I’ve worked for marketing a couple of times in my career, once I was as webmaster and I did kind of a lot of the stuff that I’m doing today, but it was more like getting content out there. And then I did education as a part of marketing too. I feel very liberated when I’m working in a marketing team. And I feel like it’s kind of a natural Connect for education, because there is so much education going on. And we just don’t give a name to it. In the activity in the marketing activity, a customer goes, I have this problem, I want a solution for this problem, or I didn’t even know I have this problem. And it came to me and I want to learn about what that problem is. And learning, learning, learning, learning, learning learning. I think one of the assumptions that I’ve always had is that, and this is sad to even articulate in words out loud is that I’ve commonly looked at sales and marketing folks as less technical. And therefore, you know, like when it comes to education, I’m not seeing that be a part of their role. But that’s wrong completely. That in sales and in marketing in particular, there has to be this understanding and cognizance of what the platform can do at a pretty deep, sophisticated level,
Adam Avramescu 28:39
in marketing are in the business of educating customers on how to use the product, why the product matters, like we work very closely with with sales and marketing.
Dave Derington 28:48
But I want to ask you this question. Because yeah. And this was kind of personal. But I’m asking you have you seen in your tenure as a customer education professional, that sales and marketing had less or more of a role to play in education? current times?
Adam Avramescu 29:12
Oh, like, like, yeah, in my career, not in the 90s
Dave Derington 29:15
in your career, and not in this book. Now in the context of this book. And I’m,
Adam Avramescu 29:18
like I told you I originally reported into a marketing department, which I just realized recently, I’ve always partnered very closely with marketing, even when I didn’t sit in marketing, product marketers, customer marketers have been some of my very best friends in making any of this stuff happen. And I believe in many ways that like product marketing or customer marketing, it’s just it’s the flip side of the same coin as customer education. Great. And so while in this book, for instance, you see a lot of examples where you’ve got like salespeople on the floor doing the training to customers. And that’s something that sort of like, I think that’s phased out a little bit, even though I do I see it happen, like, it’s not like it’s entirely disappeared, but it doesn’t appear to be like the model in the way that it is in these books. Things have centralized a little bit more. But you see it, you see it happening. And then I think the other the other piece that like the other dynamic that he’s describing is back to this, like reseller buyer user thing. He’s kind of making the point that customer education is ultimately not just about educating a user on how to use your product. But a user is going to be in an account with a buyer. So the buyer needs to be educated on how to buy the product, and on how to educate the user to use the product. But the buyer might not be buying directly from you, they might be buying from a reseller, so the reseller needs to be educated to buy the product. And I’ll give you some examples. Right. Okay, Paul talks about like, like a pepper spray company. They’re, they’re not just, they’re not just like putting instructions on the pepper spray label, they make like a training video where a police officer shows you techniques on how to use the pepper spray and how to use it safety. Or he gives an example of Grease Monkey, which is like an oil change company, having the technicians on the floor teaching customers what they’re doing during an oil change. And then he’s talking about like Boeing training airlines, on how to use their their planes. Those are all product based. And here he’s talking about like the four P’s of marketing, product, pricing promotion, and I forgot the fourth, the fourth P is, but he kind of situated between product and promotion, those are all educating customers on like, what the product is and why it’s important. Then he gives examples of customer education for promotion. And there he gives an example of like Sony’s industrial video department, going to trade shows and having people sit and like test drive the editing modules, or Marilyns, shows up again, they were in the last book. Yeah. And they’re still they’re still doing public education, with brochures and seminars. So this stuff is still happening. And the interesting thing is it’s happening, pre sales, with the goal of the customer either making a more informed buying decision, which is sort of like the promotion piece, or being able to choose and then properly use a product. So they use it again, which is like the product piece. But he considers that all marketing. Because it’s being delivered primarily, I think, pre sales. And I think maybe he’s saying in some sense that like even a company providing support is also still close enough related to a marketing function. Yeah, because I think org charts were different.
Dave Derington 33:01
It’s still education, is our point. It is still education. And I don’t know if I care where it’s being done. I think customer education is customer education. It’s it’s an example of the fluidity of our practice, it can be applied in many ways and up the stream down the stream. But I think if I were to say anything, I really like this. I mean, I think it’s actually very impactful to think our marketing team is so into helping our customers truly understand the value of the product, how the product can be used correctly. What are the this is nothing different than we’re doing today?
Adam Avramescu 33:37
No, and I think like where he clarifies this, like where this all comes into focus is at the end of the chapter, he closes it out by talking about the goals of customer education. And he highlights three, he talks about sales, trust and satisfaction. So customer education. He says, as customer education as a means to stimulate sales has long been a staple for business. You got to educate customers about what the product is. That’s marketing. Yeah. And then you have salespeople actually delivering training. So that’s that’s the pre sales motion that we’ve been talking about. Then he talks about building trust, this is like, this is the helping cells approach that they took a shard and broadcasting data and service rocket always talk about by helping customers understand the field and understand the product and not like actively trying to sell you actually build trust with them as an organization. So here he says like customer education serves a long term strategic purpose to help customers become better customers. Interesting, right?
Dave Derington 34:39
Educated customers or best customer, and that was the one that we came out of Claudia’s book.
Adam Avramescu 34:43
That’s true that was in the other book. And then finally, he talks about increasing satisfaction. So this is I think, closer to how we understand product training today, you use the product better, you’re going to be more satisfied with it. And he gives a cool example here of Ferrari inviting people out to this like scholarship program and it’ll anywhere they go to a racetrack and some like Italian dude teaches them how to drive the car on the racetrack, which is also like, that’s not just satisfaction that’s today probably what we would call like surprise and delight.
Dave Derington 35:14
You know, as you’re, as you’re reading through this I probably told this story before, but I’ll try to make it concise. This kind of stuff like the building trust the helping people understand, you know, what this product is and how to use it. And the satisfaction, the the attitude, the empathy, the feeling, like this product is important to me. One the experiences that I have, and I still won’t forget is when I was working, MLM company, I did video game tournament events, and a sponsor was the army. And I felt a little weird about that, to be honest, because I’m like, Well, what am I? What are they selling? What am I selling? How? What is this relationship about? The transformation mentally that I had about that was they took me they invited me to this thing called this influencer program. And they wanted to teach me how the army taught people. They taught their people I know, who was talking about with us, was this you or me, Brian or somebody about we’re talking about military? Actually, I think it was another friend. But we’re talking about the military and how the military trains people, and you think about churn, you think about turnover, you’re basically turning, you’re having a whole new crew, every so many months, come through and have to learn these skills that they have to take out into a combat situation or a very hostile situation. It’s really important people understand things. And what I was trained in that time is, how do you how to be in a tank simulator in the ones that are physically moving, got into the actual virtual tank, which was feel real, but then I got out the battlefield on the practice course with these tanks, and got to look inside them and touch them and watch them roll by and to see the people working with the vehicles and how they operate. And I mean, I got the feeling of what it was like to load a gun, no load the gun in an Abrams tank, I got to see, you know, like the berets, and how they would bring, you know, all this stuff. I walked away from that experience just fundamentally transformed, like, wow, this is very technically sophisticated, very fascinating. There’s a lot of neat stuff going on here. And it’s done well. And that that had a huge impact on me. Now think about that, from a company perspective, I’ve got this product, and I’ve got to see somebody the job, all the jobs, I’ve had Adam, in the last decade have done this. Why are we hiring you, Dave? Well, we want to hire you because we have a product that our customers can’t use, don’t understand or try or struggling with, don’t feel good about or unhappy with our, you know, like, this is marketing. We want to make sure people understand and feel and love the product are going to get use out of it, and know that they’re that we’re there to help them out. So really, really neat. What’s going on in this book.
Adam Avramescu 38:09
I agree. And I think like it has a tie if we want to jump, you know, several years into the future to that Lincoln Murphy quote that we always like to share? Oh, yeah, says he says we have to educate people on not just how to use our product, but quite frankly, that they need the product and what they’d even do without the product. So speaks to me to the scope of customer education continuing to remain larger than than just product education. And it’s an interesting thread that’s persisted from this book to to the present.
Dave Derington 38:40
Yeah, it gets me thinking I’ve been doing a lot of reading about Anthro or archeology and thinking and one of the I was watching a show last night about tools and you know how the first people had created, you know, they’ve created an axe and they sharpen one side of a stone, but all of a sudden, they realize I can sharpen two sides and make an arrowhead out of it. And that is who are the customer educators back in the stone age’s that we’re doing our job back then you gotta love the arrow and
Adam Avramescu 39:09
Okay, Dave, I’m ready. I’m I’m bringing out the cane. I’m reining you in on this one. We got it, we gotta keep going. So okay, so let’s let’s go let’s be brief with with these next ones, because like, in the next chapter key, he basically outlines analyzing performance problems with customers and products. And here’s where he introduces instructional systems design as the way that you can actually connect a person with a solution to their problem. So we actually he describes the ADDIE model, he he maps it out, and he’s starting with analysis, right? So just like in Addy, we start with analysis. And as part of analysis, what he’s recommending that companies do is start by understanding what The the actual gap is between a customer and the desired behavior. So he calls out that education is only helpful when it’s about lacking knowledge, skill or motivation to be able to either buy it or use it. The thing that he explicitly calls out, this is not a solution for is when the product design is poor, or the incentives to use the product or buy the product or low is interesting, right? This is it’s it’s adjacent to this issue that we always talk about where, where people say, Oh, well, the product design should be so good that you shouldn’t even need customer education. And yet he’s he’s kind of saying the opposite here. He’s saying like, if product design is poor, customer education is not the solution to that the solution is fix your product. Think it’s verification? Yeah. Like, yeah, he’s gonna come back.
Dave Derington 41:00
It’s it’s basically what Peter is saying in this is there’s a methodology to do this, right. And these, and what I really like is he succinctly wraps up, this is when it’s appropriate, and this is when it’s not. And that, that that keeps coming up all the time. I think somebody said that, to me more recently, oh, our product is great. We don’t need customer education, then why are we talking, you’re telling me that you have a problem. And that problem is that your product, you have a misconception about your product. And I think we all naturally do this, we want to believe that our product is the best thing in the world. But when you get that product, like you put your put your self in the position of the customer and have that true empathy audit with the customer and their use of it, and unbiased, you know, unbiased your perspective, you realize that your product is always going to have problems, particularly in an era now, when the product is quite literally changing under our
Adam Avramescu 41:53
feet. Yeah, yeah. And so in order to keep the customer able to not just purchase the product, but continue using it successfully, it means that you have to keep analyzing, where customer education can bridge those gaps. So this is where he gives the example for instance of looking at the performance of the product and analyzing the service calls to understand where training is necessary. And then actually using that to assess the ROI of education, because you could map it to a decrease in service calls, multiplied by like the average cost of a
Dave Derington 42:25
call this this section here, where he’s talking about that was wonderful, because it’s one of the first areas or first times you hear this call out for ROI, on education specifically. And the thing I want to say about this, again, to those who listen to the audience, is that this is really hard to calculate. And if you’re not, it isn’t, isn’t, it’s hard, because if you’re not thinking about what to track in the first place, you’re never gonna be able to calculate anything. And you have to do it early. Because if you’re not doing it early, you won’t be you won’t have you won’t have any line of sight to what you’re trying to your outcomes. But I like that I like where he’s actually gone back and said, Okay, support calls. Now, you did this in Optimizely, you had that really nice graph to show when we did this program. Our hypothesis was this, we think it’s going to create a to convert to a decrease in calls. In other places, they’ve seen that same thing, but then seeing an increase in other kinds of calls that are more in the appropriate wants. Yeah, this is a good way already quantifying and giving us some hooks in to measure the performance or program.
Adam Avramescu 43:30
Yeah, absolutely. And so then, you know, and thinking about like the different types of gaps that can be closed with the program. He points out, like if it’s a knowledge and skill problem, that’s customer education’s bread and butter, especially he calls that where new skills and technology or new systems and technologies are at play. So knowledge and skill gaps are big. He’s He’s especially calling out in tech, right? Which is especially why I think customer education has reemerged and exposed its current format and why education services did so well in tech for so long and continues to do really well in tech, especially for more complex products. So like, the example he gives here, though, is even on the buyer side, he’s like, talking about customers who are buying a computer and need to learn a ton of new terminology before they can productively buy a computer because in 1997, you don’t necessarily know how to I don’t know if this is true. I feel like I knew how to compare like RAM and like the examples he brings up but like a lot of customer. Oh, yeah, totally. A lot of customers don’t.
Dave Derington 44:32
Yeah, back in those days, we had like PC shopper magazine and stuff. And those of us hardcore nerds were Yeah, we had we had a feeling we had some of that stuff, but not everybody did. It wasn’t like it is today. Where’s ubiquity? Right?
Adam Avramescu 44:46
So sort of like like with knowledge and skill, like you could you could talk about this post sales. He was talking about this post sales, but it’s interesting that he also brings us up pre sales and this is actually what you would call product marketing today, right? helping educate the customer on what the product is. As and how it’s different from other products, and how to make a more informed buying decision based on it.
Dave Derington 45:07
Yeah. So that’s about as an education role, but it absolutely is, even though it’s your
Adam Avramescu 45:13
own. And this is why I say like product marketing and education are our best friends. We’re doing very similar things.
Dave Derington 45:21
And we’re talking a lot, usually, yeah, in cases where you’re not, you should wonder and worry,
Adam Avramescu 45:26
we’re using, we’re using the same content a lot of the times, yeah. But then like, what if it’s not a knowledge and skill thing, so then it could be motivation. And then he divides it into whether its intrinsic or extrinsic motivation, its intrinsic, that can be solved somewhat with customer education. And he has a he has this like John Keller intrinsic motivation equation, where he’s like, value times expectancy equals motivation. So value is like the value you’ll get. And the expectancy is whether you expect to succeed with it. So here the role education plays, is both demonstrating the value that you’ll get from the product, as well as increasing your expectancy, like meaning, making you more confident that you’ll be able to use it successfully. Yeah. Because we education can help with that for sure.
Dave Derington 46:18
Well, yeah, because we’re chunking. We’re breaking things down where we’re trying to approach learning pathways with clear objectives to make it easy to find and build that content in a way that it’s useful. And it’s there when a customer needs it. So that I like that, that call out the formulaic call out is another one that goes into our methodologies for customer Ed.
Adam Avramescu 46:42
Yeah, but then like, what if it’s not intrinsic motivation? What if it’s not about your desire to use the product? What if it’s an extrinsic motivation thing? So here is where he talks about if if it’s more like you’re doing reseller education, or like partner training programs, and the resellers don’t actually have an incentive to sell your product, no amount of training is going to fix that. And I can tell you, like in working with partner programs, I saw this all the time, this still exists, right? If like, like partners will say, hey, you know what, we want training, we want to get certified. But we do that, because we want business on the other side of it. And if you can’t necessarily like feed them enough business, then they’re not going to commit to learning about the product, which makes you less confident to give them business, which makes them less confident to learn about the product, which makes you less confident to give them business, which makes you less confident to teach them about the product. So it’s a cycle. And, yeah,
Dave Derington 47:42
okay, I can speak to this fairly intelligently now, because I’ve done on both sides of it. Because I am a reseller, and I am developing educational material for vendors that I work with.
Adam Avramescu 47:54
And do you have extrinsic motivation to do it to Dave?
Dave Derington 47:57
Absent freakin loosely I do.
Adam Avramescu 48:01
And that you didn’t, what application help? Well, like,
Dave Derington 48:05
Okay, I’ll give you some context. Well, I can’t, I can’t name the names, but we are. In my day job service rocket, we are a reseller of software. And we are, we have become pretty good. Like one of the programs that we’re developing right now, that’s just launch is phenomenal. And the trainer, Instructional Designer, it’s put together, he’s done all kinds of really cool stuff. But we’re motivated because we’re, we’re able to use that to help develop larger programs and larger education, you know, surfaces that we could sell off. Because it weds into other things that we do. Point being we are out or we value it, we learn it, we get rewarded, because we make more sales, and we’re generating revenue off of that. So yeah, we’re getting
Adam Avramescu 48:54
your extrinsically motivated, motivated to
Dave Derington 48:57
perform. And that means we need to go back and do training periodically and definitely want to do it. It’s high value for us.
Adam Avramescu 49:03
Yeah, so but that’s the exact hierarchy that he describes, right? Like because the extrinsic motivation is there. And because you’ll make money by doing this, then you’re willing to invest in enabling yourself to do that via training programs. Whereas if that incentive weren’t there, then training wouldn’t fix that. The other thing that he talks about the training can’t fix is the thing we talked about a moment ago, which is poor product design. So he gives examples of like unintuitive products like he talks a lot about the Design of Everyday Things the book by Norman what’s his name? Donald Norman the Norman doors guy right where yeah. Like the door looks like it should be a pull door but it’s actually a push door. Because the the affordance is like kind of signaled to you that works a different way. So he’s like, if you need if you need to, like put a label on the door that says push and It doesn’t just look like it should be pushed, then that is unintuitive product design. And you shouldn’t have to put an instruction manual on the door that says push the door should should just work the way it looks like it’s going to work. Yeah. This is like the My mom doesn’t need customer education to use an iPhone things. Like when like, you go, can you interview with like the CEO of a company? And they’re like, oh, customer education position. But we don’t need customer education, do we? Because like, you don’t need customer education to use an iPhone. It’s like, well, two things. One is that your product is not an iPhone, it’s not designed like one and even if you put a bunch of design effort into it, like it’s still probably going to be more complex than an iPhone. And the second thing I guess is like when you have you know, like like a technology like that, like an iPhone, which is being used every single day, then the like, you’re gonna figure out the use cases for that a lot quicker and more easily than like a piece of enterprise software that’s used for more complex use cases more infrequently. Yeah,