Adam Avramescu 00:05
Do you want to talk briefly about like the the user centered design and multifaceted team stuff that he talks about before we go on to the next chapter?
Dave Derington 00:12
Yeah, I think the only thing I pick up on here is that when I was looking when I was reading through, and I’m making my notes in the margins, we have this need for big picture. And, again, all the things we talked about on this show about our industry is that if we go well, where does customer education live? And who do we were, you know, what’s relevant, no matter where you live, you’re going to be working cross functionally, with people in your organization. I liked how you had mentioned embedding someone early on in the product team, from an education resource, like a documentation person. Critical, we still do that. Right. That’s, that’s super important, if I don’t necessarily call documentation education, but it is a form of education is just the
Adam Avramescu 00:56
first rotation as part of customer education.
Dave Derington 00:59
Yeah, and that’s a pillar, most of the programs that I’ve loved. It is a core pillar, but sometimes, like all the programs that I’ve learned that had it split off. And and that’s, and I would like to actually have it part of the program, because then you see cradle to grave, the entire constellation of educational topology.
Adam Avramescu 01:17
Yeah. And now that you mentioned it as well, it’s like interesting that he’s kind of bifurcating the BBS from the docks. And the training, because he’s putting the docks in the training and customer education. But he’s putting the forums community in support. Yeah. So it’s kind of like, why is one in one? And why like, and why isn’t the community considered to be a customer education activity? I don’t know. But it’s, it’s interesting to see now, like, we’re kind of re categorizing all of these into a new model, where now they’re all coming together to be part of an educational ecosystem that serves support and service goals, and marketing goals as well. Yeah. So that’s that. And now we get to the part of the book, where this is kind of the equivalent of the original Claudia Guyardo yearbook, where now we’re doing case studies. And these are quicker case studies. It’s not the bulk of the book in the same way that the 1984 book was. I think, like, we can kind of go through this
Dave Derington 02:27
quickly, because I think it’s gonna get really long if we go into details.
Adam Avramescu 02:31
Yeah, so like, like, the first example is like Pfizer animal health, educating people on how to vaccinate cows more effectively to reduce blemishing. So it would probably don’t need to talk about that. But like maybe one thing to call out is in each case, he talks about with the case study, like what real world outcome did customer education generate? So here, like the actual outcome that they were measuring? Was it lower, it did lower blemishes, and it raised sales of their like ultra back vaccine?
Dave Derington 03:00
Yeah, yeah. And the on page, if you have to have the book, look at the picture on page 122. The increase in equity, I think the point to say in some of these, so
Adam Avramescu 03:10
this is Schwab, this is the next one. Oh, that’s what I was sorry. You’re
Dave Derington 03:14
talking about Schwab now, or I’m sorry, let’s
Adam Avramescu 03:16
well that let’s let’s talk about Schwab. So Schwab, like we mentioned, it’s more for like self directed investors who otherwise wouldn’t be using a broker. And they sort of like Merrill Lynch in the 1984 book, are doing seminars in their offices, led by branch personnel, and they’re also giving their customers like third party reports. Again, like in the spirit of like building trust, and like giving them more like neutral, unbiased education on how to be better investors. So yeah, now now we get to that that graph that you’re talking about?
Dave Derington 03:44
Sorry, but I jumped ahead there. But I was thinking about that, like the visual seeing that things are there it is the only comment that we’d have to make on that as you can’t necessarily always decouple other activities from that. But getting those kinds of graphs and showing leadership book, you’re investing in those days
Adam Avramescu 04:04
for the for the audio podcast, should we describe what the graph is? Yeah,
Dave Derington 04:08
the graph is,
Adam Avramescu 04:10
so it’s basically showing like a client equity year over year. So client equity here means like, how much money they’ve invested plus the return on those investments. So like, not only are they getting people to invest more, but getting better returns on their investments, because they’re more educated investors. It goes from like in 1994, which I think is before they do the program is hard. It’s like 120 or so. And then in 95, it’s up to like, billion. Yeah. And 9095 It’s up to like, 170 or something like that, you know,
Dave Derington 04:43
some 50 50 billion, and that’s a lot of money.
Adam Avramescu 04:48
It’s 52 billion. Yeah.
Dave Derington 04:50
That’s a lot of money.
Adam Avramescu 04:51
It says it says in the book. Yeah. And you’re right like it, this can’t be reduced. And he talks about this later in the book. Like, you can’t reduce all of this to like this old He happened because of customer education. But like that’s a really meaningful result to point to in terms of educating your your investors. Yep. Okay. Then we get to three M is the next case study. This is sort of a pandemic related one because they’re talking about three M respirators. So this is like, like we had we had vaccines a moment ago. And now we have respirators, there’s a lot of like pandemic foreshadowing in this book. But what did they do this is like they had a council where they had their marketing and communications team, their tech services team and their sales training team all come together to work on educational programs. And they were inviting like distributors to teach them how to sell the right products and teach end users to care for them. And then they had this like top tier program where the distributors got this all expenses paid seminar, with product training, and value selling and leadership and performance coaching. So like going way beyond teaching them how to use the product, but like, helping them be better distributors, which I think was kind of a cool model for the reseller use case.
Dave Derington 06:08
That’s yeah, that’s really cool. I’ll tell you like some of these cases that we’re talking about here, I’ve had personal exposure to like, I’ve worked in the pharma plant, and I had to wear respirators in certain parts of the plant to go do things. And, you know, What’s the scariest thing in the world? Adam, is when you’re finding yourself in a situation writers? did? Yeah. We don’t visit Seattle in October or September. But that, that understanding that that kind of stuff, you could be in a world of hurt if you don’t know how to use it, right. Yeah. And that is scary. Because in a laboratory, there were there were times where I was actually physically scared. Because of something I had to go do. And I’m like, I don’t know if I want to do that. So then I’m looking at those materials in the training that I have on how do you fit a respirator? How do you do a fitness? How, you know, how do you make sure that it’s going to stay on when you’re sweating? And you’re trying to like Dumbo, you’ve got this huge bin of material, you’re trying to work through and stuffs all?
Adam Avramescu 07:11
Yeah, I mean, it makes it makes customer education like, yeah, the consequences here are life and death.
Dave Derington 07:18
Yeah, not so much in software. But I mean, it’s important.
Adam Avramescu 07:22
Yeah. Yeah. And like, again, same thing, this goes back to like, what is the purpose? Like, like, is it compliance? Is it safety? Is it marketing, so then like, like, they have a compliance one here, where they talk about safety clean, who there are recycle, they recycle industrial and automotive waste. So their customers are like auto shops, and they need to comply with the regulations on how to dispose of the waste. So this is actually an interesting one, because this is actually the disposal use case has positioned as well as the compliance loose case is basically like the two things that we talked about earlier, not being too relevant to our world. But their program was sort of like an l&d compliance training program. But they were doing it for their customers, so the customers could learn how to comply. So not much to say about that one, except that afterwards, we get to visit our friends at Hewlett Packard. So now we’ve got no, we’ve got a tech one. And, and furthermore, what’s interesting here is, this is the first example in the book that we see where we’re actually looking at a tech services organization. So this is HPs Education Services Program. And it’s on their professional services team. And they have personas for education. So they split it into three. And it’s not an even three, they start with their first percent of being executives and executives get pretty much like white glove, customized training, mostly presentations, it’s probably people like sitting with their their EAS in the office, like training them on how to do whatever it is. But it’s like very high level and I think more related to like teaching them about the industry versus like how to actually use the software, or hardware, I guess HP is hardware. Then there’s IT managers, so they’re getting trained more on like the practices associated with it. So they’re getting trained on like risk management, or change, business process improvement, how to invest in it. So this is more like industry and domain training. And then you get to the product training, right? Because then you go for IT professionals and users. Yeah, exactly. So this is where most of the curriculum is for sale for the IT professionals and end users. They have over 100 courses organized into curriculum paths that are focused on the actual technologies. A lot so that’s that’s where it Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it’s a huge catalog and they’re publishing like gigantic training catalogs. I think that have all of the the the course descriptions in there. And you have your choice on how to how to how to consume this training so you can go to scheduled public classes that are at HP training sites, and they’re led by HP instruct errors include some best practice sharing among the participants says like public IoT, write dedicated courses for customers with some customization. So they’ll go like on site to the customer. And they’ll give like, they’ll be like flip out the the use cases, to make it more relevant to like what industry the customer is in. Then they’ve got like self paced courses, which are, quote, print online or on video. And then they do these technical satellite seminars, which are these live broadcasts that cover advanced topics and emerging technologies. So that’s more of like a one way broadcast to the customers, and is also offered on videotape. But this is interesting, right? Because like, this is not too different from kind of the standard selection of educational services, offerings. public courses, custom on site IoT, self paced web webinar, our bread and butter, same thing. Yeah.
Dave Derington 11:00
I like how this time we’re introducing the personas as well. That’s, it’s maybe funny, and maybe remarkable sometimes that as I’m working with people, and I’m saddling up to strategy, I always say, Well, who are our personas? Who are we educating? What do they need to know? You know, what is the audience like? What what do they know already? What role do they play? How are they going to adopt? What are the risks that they’ve got? So that’s really cool to see all of this stuff laid out? And very evocative of what we do today.
Adam Avramescu 11:37
Yeah, for sure. And interesting to see like, again, where the results are pointed out here, like here, it really is. It’s customer satisfaction. And it’s it’s revenue.
Dave Derington 11:46
Yeah. It’s the system. This is all Ben here, again, we’re evidencing that the plays that we have today are similar than what we’ve done before. We’re just elevating in a different context.
Adam Avramescu 11:59
Yep. For sure. So let’s barrel through a couple of chapters left, we’re back to the ADDIE model now. So now we’re actually talking about implementing customer education programs. And this is where we put the marketing hat back on. And he’s basically saying, If you treat your education program like a product, then you need to be doing product marketing for your education product. So now we’re getting better, but we’re using marketing skills again. And so he recommends like having a positioning statement for your training. But also then, I guess, basically talks about the different ways that you can position training and how you can package it and when it’s appropriate, based on what it’s trying to do. So. For example, yeah. Do you remember this?
Dave Derington 12:49
Yeah, this was this was interesting, because you’re positioning it to different folks like a knowledge builder. And, you know, we want to position we want to make customers comfortable buying. And this is the Gibson example. And I think Gibson is one that DeLuca shard talked about,
Adam Avramescu 13:06
Lucas, about Gibson too. Yeah, he’s
Dave Derington 13:08
talked about that as well.
Adam Avramescu 13:10
So yeah, so there’s, so there’s, there’s four, there’s, there’s knowledge builder, which you talked about, that’s like Gibson teaching you how to buy the product, they’re building your knowledge about, like, how to get comfortable buying a product, there’s the most common one is positioning it as a product feature. So for example, like manuals, instructional videos, that’s part of the product, it’s bundled into the product, you’re not going to like buy a product that doesn’t have an instruction manual. So that’s bundled as a product feature. The next one is value added service. So this is more about like adding trainings and additional education, like educational offerings, that are either intended to meet customer needs and expectations, or increase their switching costs to go to another vendor, or ultimately to build loyalty. So the way he describes these is like customers don’t expect these experiences but will value them. Yeah, yeah. And then the last one, like you were set you were about to say it was like a standalone product positioning. So
Dave Derington 14:18
yeah, I think I think all this stuff is really important. If you go through it, like the value add. You know, I can get information I have there’s, there’s updates on the product, there’s bulletins, there’s communications happening all the time where we as a customer are feel loved, and we feel like we have attention. We know that it’s there if we need it.
Adam Avramescu 14:39
Right. Yeah, yeah. And so so he ties this to basically to like pricing and how you would detect when you’re when it’s a good candidate for what so like, in the most, which is like the product? Yeah. Were you gonna say
Dave Derington 14:58
no, I say go ahead with this. cuz I think this was really important, like as you’re doing the price, yeah.
Adam Avramescu 15:02
Okay, so yeah, so we ties pricing to the model that we just shared. So like, if it’s a product feature, it’s expected to be free. No loss of education included. What do you mean? No, he says, okay, include Yes, it’s
Dave Derington 15:18
no, I’m splitting hairs. But it’s, it’s expected to be free in the perspective of the customer.
Adam Avramescu 15:23
It’s expected to be part of the purchasing price of the product. Yep. So like you wouldn’t pay separately for a manual for instance,
Dave Derington 15:29
I’m really pushing back on that concept of free is that I hate using that term free, because in any case, free is devalued. And, and yeah, in which we saw a lot
Adam Avramescu 15:39
in the 1984 book. Yeah. Yeah, no, I’m quoting him, he says he says customers often expect the customer education will be free in that scenario. But he also calls out to your point that this is changing in 1997. As companies are outsourcing their training to vendors, which again, we kind of compare it to the value perceptions from the 1984 book, where as vendors are taking on the role of training people on how to use products, then companies are more willing to pay vendors to do this, because they’re no longer paying internal staff to do it. So yeah, it’s expected to be included. When it’s a knowledge builder, there’s the other one we talked about, it’s also expected to be free, not included, because you haven’t bought anything. But the point here is, is you’re trying to build trust. So if you’re educating someone on the market, or on how to buy your product more intelligently, you wouldn’t like charge them how to do that, because they haven’t even bought the product yet. I think that’s the idea.
Dave Derington 16:44
Yeah. And that one I track with because it is truly it’s part of your marketing cost, I guess your sales costs where you get in amount of information out to be able even understand what the product can do.
Adam Avramescu 16:59
Yeah, like on your financial statements, this would all be part of customer acquisition costs. Yeah. Agree. And then when it’s, when it’s positioned as a value add, it usually has a price he calls out, and there’s an expectation that it will have a return for a customer. So I think this is like where a lot of customer education is today, where it’s not like it’s not the manual, like that’s included, you get access to documentation, you don’t have to pay extra for that. But if you want the training that shows you how to get extra value, or teaching you something else about your space, we’re gonna charge for that. Right, that’s not expected to be free. But the most interesting one, I think, is when he talks about this, like standalone product positioning, because it’s 1997. And we’re about to go down the path of a lot of education services teams, kind of turning into standalone training products, where they’re basically these like businesses that are adjacent to any sort of software or hardware that that like the businesses selling. So he says, When should you package training as or education as a standalone product, he says, if the company has expertise in a certain discipline, and I would add, and that expertise is in demand, then it might be a standalone service. So the examples he gives here is like the slopes, the the resort, giving ski lessons, ski lessons are a standalone product that has value for an in demand skill, golf lessons, that’s another example. So the quote here is customer desire to become proficient is high enough that they are willing to pay for knowledge. And I want to call this out for a moment, because I think like a lot of the time we think about the business model first we think like, oh, we need to create a standalone training services business. Because like, that’s what we need to do for like the balance sheet. When we haven’t done the work that he describes here first and said, Is there actually demand for the training that we’re offering such the customers are willing to pay for it independently of the product that they’re buying? Right? So absolutely all your customers are charged for training where we’re delivering value. But yes, we also have to make sure that there’s demand for those customers to actually purchase the training. So he recommends standalone training, if like, there’s this criteria that he gives, and I love this because I’ve never seen anyone articulate it this way. One is customers demand access to your knowledge bases, that he doesn’t mean here like a knowledge base like a help center. He means like the actual knowledge that your internal people have that the customer doesn’t. So you want to work with an expert and have the expert teach you how to do stuff. Then maybe it can be a standalone offering. Number two customers can turn the knowledge of your product into a business. So the example here he gives us Macromedia who got bought by Adobe. They were the ones who made flash, but they also have Macromedia Director, and that Macromedia Director had a standalone training services business that train people to form agencies around their product. So you could be like a third party Macromedia Director, agency, creating content for your own customers. And then if you were doing that you would be willing to pay Macromedia to teach you how to start a Macromedia Director agency, right. Yeah. Third one is your product deals with leisure activities, that’s the skiing golfing thing for the educational product will not offend customers in terms of feeling that you were trying to squeeze every last dime from them. That’s the value perception thing. Yeah. This is the one I feel like we get most like, hung across in in SAS, right? Because sometimes there is that value perception of like, Oh, I’m already paying so much for your product not going to pay for the training, too. So I feel like that’s the one that’s always kind of like the question mark for us. And it’s infuriating. It is infuriating. Next one, there’s historical presence in the marketplace for offering standalone customer education vehicles. So this could be like, Oh, Microsoft offers this as a standalone training. So we can too. And finally, competitors offer similar products and services. So if you’re, if your competitor offers standalone training services, then you have precedent to offer your own standalone training services. But I think like a lot of companies just jumped straight into having a standalone business model because like, they’re like, oh, services is just what you do. But they haven’t considered these factors. And thus, they have a lot of trouble actually generating demand for their standalone services.
Dave Derington 21:38
I think that’s really important to sit with for a little bit. Because, you know, I’ve been in those teams, and you might have to where we’re, oh, we need an education team. Okay, somebody said that someone needed to learn to budget for it. And then they go, so now we have an education team. And what you said at the end of that is like, hey, you know, we we really haven’t done this, the thinking about it, we haven’t done the strategic thinking, that is like, what are you here to solve? What are you here to do? And if you don’t do that early on, and make that plan, build that model, the business model around that function, then often what happens is you’re you’re not connected into the business as well as you could be people might not be aware of you. Your executives might go like, well, what are you doing here? You might get cut? I don’t know, I guess we’re circling back to say strategy is really important. Strategic Thinking is really important part of this. And if you’re gonna build a program, and put that kind of resources into it, you should think about it a little bit.
Adam Avramescu 22:39
Yeah, you should you should not be implementing a program because remember, unnati like, you shouldn’t be implementing a program if you haven’t done the analysis first.
Dave Derington 22:46
Yeah, or even the heart. Yeah. It’s Addie, for the program itself. It’s definitely trying to do with this.
Adam Avramescu 22:54
Yeah. Well, that’s, that’s what Addy Well, okay. We’re saying the same.
Dave Derington 22:58
I mean, like when we mentioned that it we mean it as a methodology for what we deliver, but it could also be applied to the entire program macro. What are you doing with the program itself? Right?
Adam Avramescu 23:11
I don’t know. It’s almost midnight here. I’m not. asleep, you see, just see my eyes glaze over.
Dave Derington 23:21
I think we’ve This is the longest recording session we have ever done, ever, I think. So probably. If we step aside from this, it’s like, wow, we’re both probably looking tired right now. But we’re powering through.
Adam Avramescu 23:33
After after four years of doing this together. We I’m still we’re still setting records Dave. Okay, so let’s in the spirit of that, maybe just a few more points on this chapter, he does talk a little bit about like within these models having some ability to customize. And he kind of splits it into what I would call like customization and heavy customization. Like customization is basically if you have like use cases or examples in there. And you know, for instance, what industries or customers are in, you can swap out those examples to make it more applicable. But if the customization requests go beyond replacing examples, he says you should pass those costs for performing the customization to the customer, which I think is fair,
Dave Derington 24:18
I would reiterate that you should pass those costs those costs to your customer, you can make sure that that value is understood because the cost of you spending time customers always going to want something customized, but you have to make that clear. It takes Yeah,
Adam Avramescu 24:34
you have to set boundaries around and understanding what level of customization is truly warranted. You talked about how to promote your program during this phase, which I think is interesting because like again, marketer marketer talking about marketing so, like some examples he gives are like you can do advertising so like knowledge builders, for instance, you might actually advertise like, Hey, we’re doing a seminar on how to choose investment options. personal selling, that’s through sales and support. So like you, you give sales and support members talking points on like, hey, we have a training coming up and you should come to it. And it cost this much sales promotion that that’s like allowing customers to sample the programs or giving them coupons. So they can like try a little bit before they buy. But I think like where it’s most interesting is where he talks about publicity. Because he gives examples of like common talking points or like reasons you can, you can do publicity for your programs. So like, you can advertise the total number of people trained in your program, you could recognize the inaugural class that completes your educational programs, you can market the results, like a measurable reduction in accidents, failures or breakdowns attributed to your educational programs, if it’s like safety oriented, or on the positive side, you could do like a measurable improvement in production, sales or quality, attributed to educational programs, announcements of new education programs offered to customers or scheduled public education programs. And finally, awards that you’ve won. These are all forms of publicity that you can
Dave Derington 26:17
you can I ask you a question about this? As you’re reading through this,
Adam Avramescu 26:21
I suppose. Yeah. What
Dave Derington 26:24
do you think that we as customer education, people do a good job with all this?
Adam Avramescu 26:28
No. But I also think that some of these are spamming. So I don’t know that. Like, I think I think doing I think doing a good job of this implies two things. It implies, number one, that we need to find more ways to promote our program. But it also implies that we find better ways to promote our programs, like we should be promoting our programs in ways that imply or deliver value to our customers. And I don’t think like, like some of these are really important, like the measurable improvement, measurable reduction, like if we can actually generate some training some results like for the customer as a result of getting trained, we should absolutely be shouting that to the world and promoting that really well. We don’t do this well enough. But like, do we need to announce that we won some random award? Probably not, I don’t know that the customer cares about that. So I think it’s it like these, in the year of our Lord 2023. I don’t know that all of these publicity. Points are still relevant. But like, I think the spirit of this is great. And then also in the spirit of this being 1997, he talks about collateral. So he talks about making these like huge program descriptions and catalogs. So this is like before you have customer LMS systems in place. You actually have to print like gigantic booklets with all the course descriptions and the instructor names and he gives like, kind of stuff. Yeah, he gives he gives like guidance on like, how to do fulfillment systems and how to like, how to hire and staff, your training team, like do you hire technical experts and teach them how to train or training experts and teach them the technology. He talks about astral travel, that is the classic he talks about, like not having your trainers travel too much, because all their time is gonna get eaten up by travel, and they’re gonna burn out. So it’s like all this all this stuff that you have to think about when you’re running like a huge Classroom program.
Dave Derington 28:35
You know, the the last comment I’ll make on that is that I think you’ve had this experience as well. But I’ve run those teams, there’s so much good thinking in there. And it’s worth looking back to look ahead, and what you should do for training and delivery, particularly the comments and I’ll make is, don’t get yourself in a trap. Make sure that training can scale, make sure you’re doing it when it’s when it’s important. And it seems to track with what they’re saying here in the past too thick. All those things cost money and cost time and and don’t scale. They didn’t use the don’t scale part. That’s what I’m saying?
Adam Avramescu 29:10
Well, but it’s not like it’s not like this model has gone away either. Right? There are still gigantic global training programs that offer on site, public classes, go to client sites and deliver customized training like this all still exists. And in fact, this is all still expected by enterprise customers, especially in let’s say, certain industries that are not as open to more scalable modalities. But like if you’re going to build a program around that, yeah, that’s exactly what you have to do to get it to scale. You have to invest in a ton of logistics. You have to have training partners around the world, et cetera, et cetera. Yes. It’s nothing to take lightly. And you know what else you can’t take lightly is measurement. which is the last chapter? Oh evaluation,
Adam Avramescu 30:02
huh? Yeah.
Dave Derington 30:04
And now we’re,
Adam Avramescu 30:05
we’re at the end of Addie. We’re doing evaluation. There’s just like an interesting quote in here that is apropos of nothing by Robert steak who actually don’t know who that is, but presumably someone who knows something about instructional design. He says formative evaluation is when the cook tastes the soup. Summative evaluation is when the guests Taste the soup.
Dave Derington 30:31
I like that one.
Adam Avramescu 30:32
Yeah. Next time someone asks you about formative versus summative evaluation. You can use that one it guess and then we’ll thank Robert state for that. But he also describes, right, yeah, we’re going into Kirkpatrick and he uses Kirkpatrick as the framing for pretty much the rest of the chapter. But before that, he’s basically saying there there are three outcomes of your program. One is it’s going to be evaluated on whether it was effective, like Did it do what it was intended to do? Did it get the outcome that it was supposed to get? Whether it was efficient, ie it was cost effective? You got ROI on it, and that it was appealing, ie people enjoyed it. Right. And then he kind of discards that in favor of talking about Kirkpatrick because this all kind of abstract Kirkpatrick and so he’s describing, like the different ways that you can measure the different levels, and it’s not that different from what we do. Today, like questionnaires, he also calls Kirkpatrick, Don, instead of Donald, which I wonder if they knew each other? Because that seems very familiar. Oh,
Dave Derington 31:40
yeah. Okay, maybe that’s funny. Don’s Don’s methodology.
Adam Avramescu 31:47
Don Smith. Don Kirkpatrick. Yeah, I like that. Is it like it’s very familiar. It’s nice. I’m just so used to hearing it as Donald. But yeah, so like nothing, nothing too kooky in level one or two. In Level two, he talks about certification, which we’ll come back to in a moment. But like, level three, it’s interesting. He says, this is actually the hardest one to measure in customer education, which I agree with, by the way, because level three is all about measuring behavior, change and application, and you don’t have access to your customers to see whether they’re changing their behavior for a lot of products. Yeah, in SAS, we actually do now because we have telemetry,
Dave Derington 32:28
oh, you beat me to it.
Adam Avramescu 32:31
For our products, we actually monitor whether customers are doing what we what we trained them to do or not, but like for a lot of products. It’s it’s difficult. And certainly in 1997, it was extremely difficult. And then level four, which is about business results, this goes back to if you design the program, right? So he talks about, like, here’s where he talks about the whole, like correlation versus causation thing. And you can look at the change in the overall results. And you can attribute it all back to education. But I kind of like his approach here. He says, rather than correlating your educational program to the overall outcome, addressed, to what degree the educational program was responsible for improving results, and look for positive side effects. So like, it’s all those he’s getting at that like correlation versus causation debate that we always talk about. It’s
Dave Derington 33:17
such a hard one, though, even today, we’re getting better. But you know, again, it goes back to a couple of things. One, when you start out, you need to understand what hooks you’re going to use what what things you’re going to measure and measure them in while you’re developing your program. So it’s not an easy feat whatsoever. But you can do it. And if you have a good data scientist on the team, they can they can do things that you can’t.
Adam Avramescu 33:42
Yeah, yeah, I mean, you you can do these analyses we have we have more ability to do it than we ever had before. But like I think we need to recognize that even if you can do regression analyses and look at longitudinal cohorts, and like all those things that you can be doing from a data science perspective, sorry, it’s midnight. I’m not using the right terminology here. Brain anymore. Yeah, like, like, even even if you’re doing that, like customer education is still one of several things that could be happening at the same time. So like, I like I like that. He’s he’s saying here, and I think this is still true, that the correlation is not the Holy Grail. Rather, it’s having, like an intellectually honest explanation and continuing to try to understand the effect that customer education is having on those downstream outcomes. I want to I want to take a brief run by have the certification point because I thought that was interesting. He talks about that as a level two measurement and he’s saying, like he started by talking about certification as being this like, really High Stakes professional accreditation thing like he’s talking about, like EMTs needing certification, and how certification is important there because if an EMT doesn’t do their job correctly, then people die. And you can like really get sued? Yeah, right. You can you can go to like turbo jail. But turbo, Turbo JL, but the, but then he says certification has also become popular in the information technology industry. Microsoft reports that it experienced a tenfold increase in customers that certified through its various training programs. And why is that? Because you get higher service level like you can you can perform the service better. You can complete tasks quicker, you understand new tech faster, you provide leadership to other staff, you have greater self esteem, and customers hiring people who are able to work with the products. You sell them. Yeah, yeah. So these are all the benefits of certifying your customers. And this is this is a mindset that I think continues to exist in, in education teams, like executives want to do certification programs with the assumption that these are the benefits that that they will yield. But he, he asks, oh, and it’s an incentive to compete to complete training programs, like Microsoft says 74% of people agree that certification, like they’ll, they’ll be more likely to complete a training program if there’s a certification at the end. But he says like, if CERT is so good, then why is it so rare?
Dave Derington 36:41
Because it’s so hard, expensive,
Adam Avramescu 36:44
because it’s expensive. And this is like the shadow side of certification that we don’t talk about, especially if you’re doing like real high stakes certification in this book, and I’m sure costs are different today. And also these are 90 $97. Microsoft spends 45 to $50,000 to develop one. Certification
Dave Derington 37:04
easy. Yeah. Yeah, you know, we go back to that, I would come back and say, the conversation about certification and credentialing is really important to have. And the best practice probably is to determine is, is my product or platform, one that an individual using it could have a really, there’s risk, there’s high risk at something negative happening, because of the user’s interaction with the platform, if that’s at a degree of value so high, that it’s like the company is gonna lose millions of dollars, people could get hurt, you know, those kinds of things, that I would say certification in a formal context is important. But if you’re just looking, like I’m connect, trying to connect back why it’s so rare is because it is expensive. And those who try to do it, and I’ve done this, I’ve done this person, don’t have your eyes fully open to all the things that are going to happen as you build such a program. Oh, my God, I mean, it’s, it’s hundreds of 1000s of dollars in people time, system time, the process, it’s
Adam Avramescu 38:17
got to maintain it and update uh, yeah. And don’t be getting customer support questions about it. You
Dave Derington 38:23
like, once you commit, there’s no going back at all.
Adam Avramescu 38:26
It retiring a CERT is very difficult. But it also like, that’s why I also think like, you can use even the questions that he had earlier about, like whether to package training as a standalone offering to also determine whether there’s demand for cert like, are there? Is there a critical mass of people who can actually build a business around this offering? And who want to like, like, do you see actual market demand for this? If so, then maybe you can do a real certification? Is there real risk? Yes, then you should do a real certification. But if you’re not really meeting those same criteria, then you have to look at some of these purported effects of certification, like higher service levels, completing tasks quicker understanding new tech faster. And you have to ask, like, does that need a certification? or can that be like a certificate? Can that be at the end of a course it can probably be a badge? Most Yeah. Complex, like 90% of the same things.
Dave Derington 39:28
And then,
Adam Avramescu 39:30
exactly, exactly. You won’t be spending $50,000 to develop your badge. final line of the book. He ends the he’s like a bummer ending. He ends by by talking about ROI, right because he’s he’s in the Kirkpatrick model. And sometimes we add ROI at the end of the Kirkpatrick model, the Jack Phillips model is to take Kirkpatrick and then put ROI at the end. And so he says like you can you can be looking at all of these results, and you can look at correlation versus causation, and try to really understand the effects of your program. But he says, quote, return on investment should be your aim with every educational program you develop. Yeah. Knowing its actual value is extremely elusive. Yeah, and the book. Not not. That’s true. It’s no, it’s it’s entirely true. But it’s it’s, it’s like, in a way, it’s sort of like calling back to the the Claudia guide, mirror book, where she’s sort of talking about the ROI of these programs to and why customer education hasn’t been formalized as a discipline in 1984. And it also kind of goes back to ROI, right. kind of ended the same place.
Dave Derington 40:51
Well, this is why I kind of think that now, I mean, we have work to do here. But now we have a real possibility of formalizing normalizing customer education, with a series of methodologies, practices and tools that work. And the heart, the hardest part about our eye, it goes back to what we said before, you’ve got to know what you’re measuring, you’ve got to build towards those goals, you actually have to have real business, you know, outcomes. But if you want to get the return on investment, this needs to be an intentional act, and you need to be prepared to spend money on it, and you need to be prepared, at first to invest and understand that. I mean, this isn’t most of education, a lagging indicator, in pretty much all contexts. What do you mean? I mean, if I teach you today how to do something it’s gonna take until tomorrow to see if you’ve actually done anything with it. And, yeah, yeah, that’s true. So getting the return on investment is always going to be one we have to do analysis with, it’s not really direct, directly proportional to activities in the moment, I can’t see an immediate feedback,
Adam Avramescu 42:07
right, nor nor should you hold yourself to the standard of needing to calculate ROI before you even invested in the program, or built it to at least an MVP that can start to have an effect on the customer. So like, I mean, I like what you said throughout the book, about both, I think tying customer education to marketing goals, as well as ultimately like customer service and loyalty goals. But being extremely clear about what goals you’re trying to influence with customer education, what performance objectives that it will change and tying your programs to those, like everything he’s talked about the forcefield analysis. This this is I think, like a really solid perspective on how to build programs that will have some sort of impact in the business, and how to explain what problem it’s solving and get a read on, on how you’ll you’ll look at the results that were generated, regardless of if you can exactly correlate it to the training intervention.
Dave Derington 43:16
Yep. That’s all I can hope for.
Adam Avramescu 43:19
Yeah. So Dave, like, I guess wrapping this up? You’ve read this book. We’ve read the 1984. Book. Yeah. Have we solved the mystery? Like, what happened to customer education? This thing that was being defined in 1984. And this thing that now has like distinct strategies and tactics attached to it in 1997? Where did it go? Has it been here the whole time, just under different names?
Dave Derington 43:54
I think so. I mean, remember the phrase I always like to use its customer education is new and not new. I think that it’s like a shadow practice. It’s been in the shadows forever, but not I mean, it’s then there. People always talk about education. We always talk about these things. But it seemed. But let
Adam Avramescu 44:14
me go ahead. Go ahead. No, let me let me ask you this, like this is what I’m curious about. Not necessarily like I don’t think customer education literally disappeared for 25 years. My question is more like in these books, customer education is being primarily described as a sales and marketing activity. So this thing that is called customer education, is attached to sales and marketing. It’s not just in software, SAS is is not even around yet in these books. And yet, then, like 25 years later, customer education re emerges in the context of SaaS, specifically as a post sales motion. Something was happening between 1997 and 2010 or so and I’m Marketing. 2010 is like when Customer Success kind of comes into its own stems out of it.
Dave Derington 45:07
Do you think that’s it? No, that’s what comes to me. It’s okay. I’m just gonna riff for a minute. But I think this was really important I ended up on. I feel like, again, going back to a frame up, we’re kind of bookended our career is kind of bookended by this journey of this education where we started out early in our careers, living in this ecosystem of emerging software and strategies to solve the problems and the internet happened, you know, Netscape, all that
Adam Avramescu 45:37
kind of world wide web and BBs Wide Web,
Dave Derington 45:41
and all these technology, technological interventions. And now all these new tools have emerged. And the conversation started to change. Because when you think about marketing and stuff, I remember being in marketing teams early on in like, early 2000s, late 90s, marketing had a different tone. And Tom, are you talking about books and going to conferences and stuff. But then in the middle of that, I was working in a marketing organization where I’m now everything’s about web, and it exploded, and now we’re doing all these things online, webinars are emerging. And we’re putting online material out there for all this stuff. And the conversation just flipped. And I feel like what happened is that we were all like, people were continuing to forge forward and do the things that they thought they needed to do. But it all of this emergent technology was disrupting, disrupting, disrupting, it’s like, God, rapid evolution, where you’re constantly having these minor apocalypses on a poor life form and forcing it through evolutionary change. And it’s kind of like what happened is, we just kept getting kicked, and beat up and massaged and learning and then now 25 years, you know, 40 years later, depending on which book you use. It’s all done there. Right? It’s all there. But what we’re kind of saying is, today, we understand that all of this thing is called customer education. And now this is what it looks like, hasn’t gone away. It’s just Yeah, transformed. And now it’s a known quantity in it is a practice that we can label and use repeatedly in a repeatable manner.
Adam Avramescu 47:20
Yeah, yeah, I agree. I think I have like a slightly different hypothesis, but it’s not like out of keeping with yours. I just find this fascinating,
Dave Derington 47:29
what what’s different? And what would, what years.
Adam Avramescu 47:33
So we have to think on one hand about, there’s two things that are fundamentally different about customer education as being described in these books and how we know it today. One is that it’s primarily being described as a pre sales, activity, sales and marketing. The second is that it’s being described, not as a thing that only exists in tech. Right? And not that I’m saying the customer education today is only in tech. But we don’t know a lot of people who are in like, like, let’s, let’s say what, like manufacturing or finance, or CPG, or industries like that, that are describing the thing. They do? pre sales as customer education. Right. So it’s not called that?
Dave Derington 48:25
No. So
Adam Avramescu 48:29
I think a couple of things happened. One is that, first of all, outside of tech, all of these activities have kept going, right, like people are still producing documentation. They’re still writing instruction manuals. They’re still educating the customer pre sales. But I think like, it has I think I think this stuff still lives in sales and marketing. Yeah, it’s just not really called customer education there. It might be called Content Strategy, or, like, knowledge centered service, or even like technical writing in some cases.
Dave Derington 49:18
What about sales enablement?
Adam Avramescu 49:20
I don’t know if they call it sales enablement outside of tech, but yes, whatever the equivalent of sales enablement is like, like, enabling the sales force to actually sell the product. Yes, that I think that’s where that’s like, it all still exists. It’s just kind of like cold, different things. And then inside of tech, something different happened. I think like what is being described as customer education here was kind of like, try for cated and subsumed into three. Yeah, these are these are midnight thoughts. It’s it’s split into three things. Like one is definitely product marketing, like everything that he’s talking about here in terms of marketing, market readiness, sales enablement, like like in the Pfizer example. All of that lives in Product Marketing and Sales Operations now, it’s all still around in tech. Right. But all that stuff about like positioning, and enabling the salespeople to do the demos and handle objections. That’s all in either sales enablement or product marketing. And one big thing that product marketing does is sales enablement. Right. So it never really left sales and marketing. It just got a new name. Like a lot of this book is about what we call product marketing today, not actually about what we call customer education today. Then the pieces that are more related to service like call deflection, ticket deflection, and customer loyalty. Which even in this book seem to have like shared ownership and and the the 90 Day before book, right, like it’s like sometimes in service, sometimes in sales, sometimes in marketing. That stuff, I think, ended up that ended up going into customer success. And then eventually being recreated as customer education as we know it today, once they realized that they needed to make that more scalable, because like, think about it, it’s 1997 in this book, customer success, like the beginning of customer success is only like six years away. We’re not that it’s not this is not ancient history, like customer successes is coming.
Dave Derington 51:30
Yes, right on the run the forefront. But then Customer Success had to evolve.
Adam Avramescu 51:34
Customer Success had to evolve, it had to kind of like merge a little bit with support because customer success and customer support weren’t always in the same org and sometimes still aren’t in the same org. So all of that like service design, customer support stuff. That kind of went down its own path. But then especially in tech, you had this third thing. And I was talking with with Sharon Castillo, who he who he mentioned on a different episode that we recorded tonight. So that’s not helpful. She’s she’s at Okta now but she’s she’s run many successful training organizations. And she pointed out to me, when we were talking about the 1984 book, she was like, Adam, I was there like I was I worked with, with digital, which was one of the case studies from the 1984 book. I knew their team was around in 1987. Like, I did this. And I was like, Okay, so can you explain to me like, what happened? She’s like, well, there was a lot of consolidation of these various customer education functions, into education services teams. And the education services teams served both pre sales and post sales, use cases. They did both, sometimes internal and external training. So all of the like, the training stuff, specifically, like what this book would call, I think the value add, training, got siphoned off into more like standalone education services business. So it’s exactly what the book is describing. But I think putting the emphasis on, hey, you know what, like, as a tech company with a really complicated product, we know that customers are willing to pay us to teach them how to use the product. They’ve, they’ve laid off their HR teams, and they’re expecting vendors to train them, we will train them as a business. So that’s, that’s how education services really started growing like I think, in the 90s and into the 2000s. Okay, which is why, by the time we get to like more modern customer education, as we know it now, like not education services, but this kind of more like SAS, sometimes pre sales, sometimes marketing, sometimes customer success fee to free spectrum. customer education, has one foot in the world of education services just modified for SAS, and especially modified for product led growth companies. Because when your product lead, and you’re not dealing with a lot of enterprise customers, and the perceived barrier to entry has to be low, you have to package in your training. And it can’t be the standalone offering, because that makes your product seem more complex. So that’s why education services had a tough time getting foothold in product led companies until they went enterprise. Right. Right. Yeah, yeah. And then like those companies grow and they mature and they start acquiring more enterprise customers than they realize they have to build training services, again, and the cycle continues there. But like, all of that stuff, basically, I think, got like subsumed and acquired by education services, businesses, education services, businesses, built standard ways of doing they had organizations that taught them best practices for for being better at education services. And then like SAS and product lead growth came along and needed something that was different. And that thing that was different is what we now call customer education.
Dave Derington 55:11
And now that’s kind of like going back and informing other fields like, well, education services are now looking at customer education practices,
Adam Avramescu 55:19
but they’re informing each other, right? Because like customer, customer education, like like the new customer education is half based on education services. And now Education Services is also saying, Well, let’s look at what customer education did to kind of adapt to its own market. And now let’s infuse our practices with some of that. So it’s cyclical. But I think customer educate was the other thing, customer education did differently because of the types of businesses that were supporting. And because we’re dealing with SAS products in a customer success environment, where the customer is constantly renewing, well, what are we doing, we’re almost doing a sales and marketing function. We’re just marketing and selling a renewal instead of a actual sale. And that just didn’t really exist in like, 1984. It wasn’t as fast. So I think that’s what happened.
Dave Derington 56:14
Well, we’ll have this emerging story over time, I think we’re not going to not going to quit looking for resources and books and talk about the history.
Adam Avramescu 56:23
And if you were around for this, if you were around in 1984, or 1997, or any of the intermittent period, where you can help us unravel this mystery, like like Benoit blanc himself, I would implore you, I would implore you, dear listener, to get in the comments. Tell us what happened.
Dave Derington 56:48
I think that’s a good, good transition to help us take this home. All right, any other comments? Otherwise, I’ll start closing it out. Yep. We talked a lot. Well done on this one. And this was a good book. This was a good read. Definitely in our C lab. Book Club. Now, we should probably put that list up on the website. I should
Adam Avramescu 57:11
we should close all the recommendations you make. Hey, actually, one more thing, Peter, how fine if you are somehow listening to this come on the show. We want to interview you.
Dave Derington 57:21
Yeah, we’ve spent quite a lot of time on your on your book here. We would love to reach out and we will probably at mention you on LinkedIn, because I know you’re out there. All right, everybody. Well, thanks again for listening. This has been this has been our marathon of episode creation. If you want to learn more, we have podcast website at customer dot education. There you can find our show notes and other material. And if you found value, yes, this is a value add in this podcast. Share with your friends, your peers over beers in your network help us find the others.
Adam Avramescu 57:58
And if you want more of a knowledge builder, you can find us on LinkedIn. And Thanks Alan Kota for the theme music. You know the drill. Leave us a review. Please don’t make it about how we talked too long on this episode we’re trying. We’re trying to provide value. But, you know, if we helped you then we’d always welcome a positive review and help out help share a little show with the rest of the world.
Dave Derington 58:28
Well put, and to our audience. Thanks again for joining us. Get out there educate, experiment and find your people. Cheers
Adam Avramescu 58:36
Tata