In this episode, our host Anika Zubair chats with Bill Cushard, General Manager at Dragonboat about everything you need to know about customer education.
At some point as your business grows your CSMs are not going to have the capacity to continue to educate your customers individually. So, when should a SaaS company start adding customer education into its business? How do you use customer education to grow customers, gain new prospects and educate your market? And what are the KPIs and data points that you need to measure for a successful customer education department?
Podcast enquiries: sofia@planhat.com
In this episode, our host Anika Zubair chats with Bill Cushard, General Manager at Dragonboat about everything you need to know about customer education.
At some point as your business grows your CSMs are not going to have the capacity to continue to educate your customers individually. So, when should a SaaS company start adding customer education into its business? How do you use customer education to grow customers, gain new prospects and educate your market? And what are the KPIs and data points that you need to measure for a successful customer education department?
Podcast enquiries: sofia@planhat.com
Hello everyone. I'm your host, Anika zer. And welcome back to the next episode of the customer success channel podcast brought to you by plan hat, the modern customer platform. This podcast is created for anyone working in or interested in the customer success field. On this podcast, we will speak to leaders in the industry about their experiences and their definitions of customer success and get their advice and best practices on how to run ACS organization. Today, we are speaking with bill Kuhar who at the time of this recording started his new position as general manager at dragon vote. Prior to his current role, bill was GM and head of customer education at service rocket for over nine years, where he was responsible for developing innovative solutions to support clients, organic growth ambitions and customer enablement. One of Bill's special is helping software companies design their customer education business model and strategy. In order to enable customers grow customers, win customers and create new markets of customers, which is a topic we will be chatting to bill about today. Bill is also the former host of help sales radio. The world's longest running customer success podcast. And today bill will be chatting to us all about how customer education fits into the customer success org, welcome bill to the podcast. I am so, so excited to have you here with us today as a fellow podcast host and someone who shares so much knowledge about customer education with the community. I am so excited to obviously have this chat today, but before we get into our topic of the day, can you please tell our listeners a little bit more about yourself, your career at thus far? What have you been up to? What are you doing? Let us know who you are.
Speaker 2:I have something new. Uh, I just started this week. I'm day four on my new job. I'm a general manager at company called dragon boat, which is very new and we're breaking news. Onika this
Speaker 1:Is so exciting. Am I the first person to publicly kind of announce this other than what's on LinkedIn?
Speaker 2:Yes, it's on LinkedIn, but I didn't do a post. I didn't there's no announcements or anything. So that's new. And I was, well, dragon boat is product portfolio management. So product managers use it to see the entire portfolio of their products so they can make decisions either that are outcome based, et cetera. And so previous to this, I was at service rocket for, you know, eight and a half years with probably many of your listeners know maybe a small number of them know, and that service rocket, uh, Iowa is running a SAS business unit called learn dot, which is a software that helps software companies build customer education, which is the topic. Right? Yep. And so before that, in my career, my background is a lot in corporate company and customer education and all kinds of various forms.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Super exciting about the new role and a little bit of a shift, but not really, I guess GM is different than what you have been doing, but still falls in the track of customer education and what we're gonna be talking to you about thus far. I know that you are obviously help sales radio. I think that that maybe has ended, but I would love to know from your perspective, I know there's a lot of CS podcasts or CX podcasts out there. What inspired you to actually have your own podcast and start help sales radio?
Speaker 2:There's two answers for that. The first answer and maybe the most accurate answer. Sarah E. Brown made me do it. People who listen to the show probably don't know the first 70 episodes or so I co-hosted with Sarah Brown. And she worked at service rock and she's a marketing expert. She's a VP of marketing. So it was kind of her idea. And we did it together cuz you know, we're friends and it was fun. And that's the first answer. The, uh, second answer is I did a lot of webinars and training courses. I like it. I like, I've always been a trainer kind of a person. So I like having conversations. I like facilitating discussions. So a part, a podcast seems like a natural fit for my interests and personalities. It just kept going and we did 354 episodes and over six and a half years, I call it the longest running customer success podcast. So now everyone else can catch up because it's there won't be anymore. I don't think which is kind of sad, but also the way it goes and uh, catch just, you were on the podcast. I mean people like you say yes. I mean, I mean you're a podcaster, right? It's like it, isn't amazing how you could ask, ask somebody smart and famous and cool and a CXO or a VP of, or a manager, right? Like, or somebody who's coming up in their career and you can, they just say yes and you can just have cool conversations and learn from people. I
Speaker 1:Love it. Yeah. I love it. Exactly why I host this podcast and spot on. Yeah. And I loved being on your podcast and I'm super honored that you took the time to chat with us today as well. And as this is a customer success podcast, customer education, in my opinion, fits into the wider customer success org. But I'd love to hear from your perspective, you know, how does customer education fit into CS or CX? How have you seen it? Maybe give our listeners a little bit more of an understanding of, of where it all fits in.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And customer education can fit many forms right on top of that. So definitely look, if you just think of everything in the world that exists at a, in a technology that is post sale in general, that's some kind of a function that's designed to help a customer do something, you know, could be support or professional server, whatever it is you're gonna help a customer do something. And so doing training courses, whatever, how you know I'm using that term, loosely is one way to help a customer learn, use, adopt, learn the next thing, what, you know, when a customer has new employees that sign on something that the new people can, how to use your software and all that stuff. So all those things. Now it could be on a product team. There are a lot of companies now that have that call it product education and a product team runs it. And so that philosophy is based on, okay, we have a product, everything is sort of led by the product. It's probably a free me model, right? And so whatever we can do to help people get into the product for free, help them learn how to use it, help them convert to a paid account. All of that would be product education. Now you can go to the other extreme and say, a customer education team could be its own function. It could be its own P and L and run by a general manager at a software company and make millions dollars in revenue, gigantic margins, margins higher than professional services organizations. And so when you're getting into that territory, the red hats of the world, the Splunks of the world, Cisco, Microsoft, AWS, they have gigantic education organizations. And so these people are different they're general manager is who run it. It's not just a course designer. So they're the two extremes of, let's just put some information in the product to help people learn to running education as a business unit P and L run by a general manager at a technology company.
Speaker 1:And I'm guessing that's what you're doing now in your new role, by the sounds of the title. And you're kind of transitioning into as well. Did I get that right based on what you're sharing or is it more of the general manager across the wider business,
Speaker 2:Across the wider business and
Speaker 1:Will ed education then still fall in your remit as well? Or is it gonna be a part of the customer success team?
Speaker 2:Okay, well that is to determined. So, you know, dragon boat is series a, so it's very early on, you know, 32 employees. So we're not making those kinds of decisions, you know, where customer education needs to fit. You know, what we're doing now is whoever's available is helping the customer today. Yeah. And we have customer success managers, there are four, I believe now am a day four. Right? So we have that title and what the, those people do is run onboarding, which includes teaching customers, how to use dragon boat after it gets all configured and set up. Right. So we may leverage a partner network to educate, we may do it in house. I mean, all these decisions need to be made strategically. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And you talked about a few different ways that customer education into the whole remit, like you said, smaller, maybe it falls in customer success. And then in large organizations like Amazon, like Splunk, like you mentioned, there almost a counterpart to the professional services or part of that kind of wider revenue, secondary revenue business as well, where you can earn millions on a, on a customer education certification program. But also it can be just a general function within, with under a GM or maybe a COO or something like that, where it's, it really can be in so many different directions. And I think some of our listeners who are maybe at SaaS companies, or maybe even startup SaaS companies might be thinking about, Hey, how do I add customer education into my business? Or when should I add it into my business? What's your expertise on that? How do you, how have you seen it done, especially if you're kind of just dipping your toe into it?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Context on how I look at it is that Paul Graham blog post called do things that don't scale. And so I recommend everyone read that who's in technology and they need to read it once a quarter like Friday afternoon at lunch, read the blog again, because what it talks about is not leaping so far in your attitude to making everything scalable and building out all of this infrastructure and, and technology that can scale before you even have two customers. Like, what are you doing? And example is if you create e-learning and most people listening, sort of know what that is, right? Videos and slides and audio and, and screen sharing. Okay. E-learning E takes a long time to create, to get to a place where you can show it to a customer. So there's all this upfront cost of time to do it. And then you release it. Well, that could take you three months. Let's just say as an example. So how do you even know if that's the right topic, the right format? If your customers want that, if they need it and then you, and then you go, oh, nobody likes it or it was no good or we didn't market it. Right. Okay. So that's a scalable way to do it because your e-learning is out and now all of your customers can watch it at the same time. You could even put it on YouTube. You could put it on your Facebook page. You could put it on a wi link it and share it on blogs. Okay? Yes. But you know what I can do by Thursday, I can call one of my customers, send them a link and get some slides and get my demo account ready and say, let me show you how to set up users and set the permission schemes. I could do that now. Right. Even with no prep. So I'm not saying you have to do live training, especially if your whole business model is product led and freemium and convert to paid. And we don't wanna talk to anybody. And our engagement model is digital, right. But you should be thinking, what can I do by Friday to help a customer learn something? Right? And so how you start is figuring out your company's culture, figuring out what works for your company and the smaller you start, the less permissions and approvals and things you have to get for people. Right? If I go in and do a propo, okay. You know, right. It's like if I go in and do this big old customer education, I'm gonna run a PNL and I'm gonna be a GM because I did it at this last company and we're gonna make 20 million a year. You're gonna get laughed out of the room and the CFO and the CEO and this VP. Right. But if you just send a link out to a customer today, or just do three screen records of the most common features and send that link out to the wi link to seven customers, you don't need permission for that. I mean, most of the time, most of us don't right. So in general start small aah, as my advice, but also in the context of how the business works, you know, how your, how your business model is and how the culture of your company works. That's how I would answer that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I totally agree. I think that, like you said, just thinking backward of how can I help my customer today? Whether it's a screen recording, a slide, something to help them understand your product or how to better utilize is your product is really the first place to start. And you don't even need a customer education person. You don't, you, you basically need just someone who wants to own that. And that's where it can all start, which is like you said, starting small, definitely eliminates the red tape and there's no permissions needed or budget needed or allocation of anything. But right. I think a lot of people who look at customer education, they aren't even sure where to even start enabling their customers. They're a little bit lost or unsure. And you've already mentioned, like you said, the video or, or a slide deck or something, what in your experience, what are some great ways to just start enabling your customer?
Speaker 2:If you are being asked to do this and you don't know where to start, you probably do know where to start in the sense that if you're talking to customers, you probably know what they complain about most or where they get stuck or where they have problems. And you know, maybe you're a CSM and you've done six onboarding calls this week. Is there a pattern? I mean, is there one thing that everybody gets stuck on, right? Like why can't they delete a user after they add it? Well, cuz it's designed, you can only deactivate people. And why is that? Well, because it really, if you delete a user deletes all the history of a user and the, and so you, we, we don't wanna, we wanna preserve that. So is it deactivate, blah, blah. Like explain that that's your first class, right? That's your first video. That's your first, right? So that's, that's one way you sort of intuitively know what you repeat in these meetings with customers or repeat over. I mean, you know, right. Like, ah, explain this. Don't how come our customers don't understand this. Right.
Speaker 1:There's been plenty of times where I'm like, I feel like I repeat my myself day in and day out and that could easily be like you said, a piece of enablement. Yeah, too, because I've said it 10 times today.
Speaker 2:Totally. Now another place is, uh, a support function and your support queue. Now, if you're early stage, you may not even really have a support team. Right. So you might not have this data, but if you have a support queue, you a lot of good support teams categorize the tickets. Right. And so you could say what's the most common category of tickets after bugs, right? Let's say, or issue requests, you know, feature requests. I want orange buttons. Right? There's gotta be the password. You know, I used to work at E-Trade the number one support ticket password reset.
Speaker 1:Or I three login. I'd have to say that. Right. That's the two call exactly. Password reset. Or I can't log into my account today.
Speaker 2:That's exactly right. Right. I mean, so that's the number one. So now you put all the content on the website. You want people still don't wanna read it and they just want someone to help. Okay, fine. But that's another way to do it. The support the best. And I would say most advanced way to do it is frankly I would do a value proposition canvas because on the right side of the value proposition, canvas is where you create a customer profile. And there are three elements of that. It's the jobs the customer's doing the gains they want to achieve and the pains they want to avoid. Right. And if you can map those things out, you sort of figure out, oh, these pains to avoid, we should teach customers how to avoid them. These jobs they wanna do. We should teach them how to do them. These gains, they want to achieve, let's teach them, do that. Right. And that might go beyond the product. But that's another way to look at how, what your customer wants to accomplish and needs to do. Right. And I'll just, I'll just add one more that I think is almost universal that nobody thinks about, and this is extreme empathy. I read a book, extreme empathy, but everyone of you sells software and the moment your customers buy it, some VP is gonna say show in the next manager meeting, show me the report of the, whatever the stuff it is that we do in this software. Right.
Speaker 1:Definitely gimme an ROI of why I decided to pay X, hundreds, or thousands of dollars for this.
Speaker 2:Okay. There's that? Yes. And then there's the, let's say you buy a marketing automation software, you know, someone's gonna say, okay, how many leads do we get this week? Yeah,
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:Okay. Like, that's basic. If you get a CRM, like how many deals did we, how many opportunities did we create this week? Yeah. Your customer needs to figure out, oh my gosh, I have to go into the meeting. I have to prepare the slide deck for that meeting to show the reports. How many of us have like export to Excel, do stuff in Excel, create the charts in Excel, copy and paste those into a slide deck so that we could go into a, like the best thing you could create training for is how to run your reporting, your manager, meeting, report, session, whatever you wanna call it, uh, teach them not just how to run a report in your software, but teach them how to create your deck. That says outcome number one, number of users who logged in number of leads. We got number of pipeline that went up. If it's marketing software, right? Like pick your software, like yeah. Give them the 10 reports and teach them how to do the slide deck. Yeah. Right. Make them look like rock in your manager meeting. That's cool.
Speaker 1:I think that's missing by the way, bill. I think we you're already talking about a great idea of anyone who's listening, who wants to start a software company that helps that middle part, taking the ROI or helping build the right deck to present to management rather than like you said, exporting data from the software, putting it in Excel. Oh my gosh. Building a graph, taking that graph, putting it in a slide and then writing the correct bullet points around it. Shouldn't there be something in the middle already. I think you're onto something great. It's made me think of, I don't know if you follow board Elon Musk on, uh, on Twitter, but he's always tweeting something like someone, please start this because I think it's a great idea, but I don't have the time to do it. And that sounds like a great idea, but who has the time to do it?
Speaker 2:That's funny. I just, I just think of, of my customers, like struggle. Like here's what we do, right? We say, oh, I'll show you how to run a report. And we go click on the reports tab and see the filters here. And then you import hear all your data objects and it's like 10,000 of them. Right? Like, and people go, I don't even, what are you talking about? And you see here, you could just do filters. That's easy. You just filter for what you want. And then it's like, I don't understand anything you just said. And so, and then I have to figure out what my boss wants and translate that into figuring out how to use the report. Right. Using the reports. The E is not even the important part. So it's just like the empathy of help your customer go. Do that, teach that class.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely. I a hundred percent agree. I think every software company I'm taking notes right now for RCS team. I'm like, they just need to help the customer at the end of the day, do the meeting in front of their boss, help them look stellar and like a rock star in front of their boss. Yes. I love it. I love it. Okay. Let's uh, transition more into like how customer education helps expand or grow customers. We talked obviously a little bit about how to get started, you know, where do you even start to enable your customers? We, which is a great place to start, but maybe there are some people listening today that have already started some of the steps we've just talked about, about educational content or enabling customers. But how do you then use that education to help grow accounts? Whether it comes down to the renewal or an expansion, or maybe even a, a, you know, cross functional expansion. Like how do you end up using education for that purpose?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right. You're right about that. The first priority is the enabling of customers, right? Yep. It's the job and the feature stuff. Right. And that when you get a good handle on that, which of course it's endless work. Once you get that, it's, it's now how can education contribute to growing those customers to the next thing? And, well, what obvious thing is, especially if you have multiple use cases in your product and or you have modules that customers can purchase to do other things, those other value propositions, you need to have trained classes on those things for customers specifically that don't use them. Right? So you could really target your customers. You go to your marketing team and you say, or maybe your product team show me all the customers that don't have this module. Yep. Oh, half our customers. Oh my gosh. It's 80% of our customers. Okay. I'm gonna build a training course or courses or video, whatever it is and teach customers about this problem that this module solves about the value propositions they can achieve if they do it and then how to do it. Right. And then they're gonna say, I don't, I have that problem. I don't know how to solve it. I didn't know. You could help me solve it. I thought we bought you just for this use case. I didn't know you did that. Oh my gosh, I'm in this class. We need to buy this. Right. And now you have a lead for your sales team or however that works with your company, right. At least you're, this is you going back to the extreme empathy idea. You say, I know this customer needs to know this one day. And especially if you're a CSM who asks question of your customers and your QBR, like, what are your goals for next quarter? Right? Instead of just showing them the usage data, you say, oh, let's have a slide, a blank slide goals for next quarter. What are they? What are your initiatives? And let them tell you and you think, oh, they wanna do this next quarter. We have a module for that. Or, or an integration with something that, whatever it is so that you're thinking ahead and you can or get the education team or you make the course for it. Let's say, now you could just help them do that in your meetings, but that's a way to do it, teach the customer the next thing right now, you have to have a next thing. And so this is where you can go back to your product teams and help product teams develop other offerings. Because if customers are telling you things they want to achieve next and you don't have something to help them with that yet. Well, that's good feedback for the product team, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely. And I think what you're just saying, there is so important, a combination of two things to really help your customers grow and accounts grow with customer education. One being look at they're looking to do next, really find those pieces of information out and then build content around that. So it's just there so that you can continue obviously using that for that specific customer that's asked for that integration or use of an additional module, like you said, but I think a lot of people can use customer education for what, you know, a lot of people call it's like white space analysis, like look at all the features that aren't used by your customers, or go look at like, you know, the most underutilized integration that you do have, and that's looking at it. You can grow half your accounts by 50% because they're not using this module. And that's a great place to obviously continue to grow and expand your accounts by really doing the analysis of what's not there essentially. And I think as CS CX customer education matures, I think a lot of people have to start thinking and looking in those ways to, to dig out the content, cuz the customer is extremely educated. Let's say these days or they know what they want, they know what they bought you for, but it, sometimes they don't know what they don't know, which, um, leads me kind of into the next topic or, or question really is like, how do you end up figuring out which content to create for existing customers? Like, like we just talked about versus can we use customer education for new prospects as well? Like which way does customer education sway towards?
Speaker 2:Yes. I think a big miss is a software company whose attitude is training is for our customers. I think that is terrible, terrible, terrible. What I mean by that is your education can be a marketing strategy. And I'll just give you an example of Cloudera Cloudera, which is, you know, Hudu and a leader in that they hired customer education employee number 20 before they had marketing before they had customer success. Okay. And they went on the road at the Marriott ballroom B on Johnson street, right in Waymouth England. And they taught Hado and they taught intro to data science and they taught how to use Cloudera and they sold it and their classes were sold out and they had to raise the prices until people stopped buying the course. And because they were creating a movement, right. And big data was beginning to become a thing that we, if we didn't learn, we would be bankrupt kind of thing. And so that was their first strategy. They went out and it became, and Sarah Brunel who then ran, it would say cut education was our marketing. And it was our customer success. That what it that's what it was. And so anyone who's creating software to do any, to help a, a person to do a job, any job, community management or customer success or marketing or data science, right? There are data scientists and marketers and customer success managers and community out there trying to be better at their jobs. And if they can learn about these things from you, they're gonna buy from you more likely than they'll buy from somebody else. Right. HubSpot did this great. They built inbound marketing certifications and put that out for free. Now Cloudera on one, they charge big money for their classes like five grand for a week to grand for two days kind of thing HubSpots was free, but people said, I wanna be an inbound marketer. So I'm gonna take, oh, HubSpot has, oh my gosh. Oh, I'm gonna buy HubSpot. Right. So you're out in the public education can help you create the category that your software was designed to, to help create. Right. So that's how you get out into the public.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And I think that the market out there right now, the target market that every software company is chasing well educated, but there's just so much more, you can be training and educating and almost creating a cult following, like you just said, HubSpot has, you know, their Inbar inbound marketing training. So if I take that course and then go to an another software company that needs that certification, it's so key to me getting my next role. And obviously they've created this course so that everyone can benefit, obviously the person taking it, but the companies that then can hire the right people. And again, training the market is so important because customers are in the know and they can do their research, but you can also help them do their research and obviously further educate the, the market as well. But how do you use customer education to continue to educate the market? There's obviously the top of the funnel where you're kind of letting everyone know about your brand or your product. How do you use education to make sure that the market is fully aware of, of your offerings?
Speaker 2:Yeah. The next level of what we just talked about is like it's really certification and creating it in a way that makes it a legitimate thing that the, that people wanna get and that hiring managers want to hire for. And that HR teams want to write into job descriptions. So think about that virtuous cycle of, I need to get a cert get certified so that I can get a job. And the job description has the certification on it. And the hiring manager is looking, is recruiting for people with that certification. And now you've created a market of people who will a become your customers B take your product with them when they move jobs. Okay. So go back into the olden days, Microsoft and Cisco, you know, you can't get a networking job anymore without a Cisco network engineer or, you know, you can't get a job running Microsoft enterprise software at a company anymore as an administrator, without the Ms. MCSC, whatever it is, right. Amazon is getting there too. You cannot get a job in cloud almost without an AWS certification. Yeah. It's like becoming that red hat to the same thing,
Speaker 1:Salesforce, to be honest, I think to me, what comes to mind is also Salesforce admins. Like that is a big market and what Salesforce has done with their academy and what they educate the market and their users on a Salesforce admin has so much power, especially when you become certified. And then now you almost have to be certified in order to even have yes. A job within that, in that field.
Speaker 2:Yes. And let's just add to this, to do it properly and to do it the way those companies do it. It has to be a credible certification, which means you have to put effort into it. You have to hire experts. The tests you write have to be tests written by people who know how to do that. Not by you and me who just write down, uh, which button do you click on the screenshot to make the, to save it, right? There's all these things about, you know, exams being defensible, right. And minimizing bias, right? Because if the, if a question is asked and different people through it, different ways and there's, it's not repeatable, it's a bad question. And someone can say, oh, wait a minute. I'm gonna get fired for my job. If I don't pass this, cuz lots of tests are like that. Like series seven, stock, broker credentials and financial services. Like if you don't pass your, your insurance license or your stock broker license, you get fired or you don't have a job. So if the test isn't credible, I can go back and Sue people and say, oh wait a minute. It was biased against me because of whatever the reason and cuz the test wasn't written properly. So if you wanna go all the way and make it credible, you have, but you don't have to start off that way. You could start small and I would maybe resist calling it certification in the early days I might call it, here's your certificate, blah, blah. There's lots of details that you can look up. And when you get to this level, you'll, you'll learn this and you'll hire people that know how to do it. But why isn't everyone thinking about this? Because you can create the certification. Your software is designed for an entire or industry of people who are doing a certain job, right? Supply chain management, customer success, marketing sales, healthcare management, biotech researchers have software that they use. They probably need to be certified to use that software. So why not you?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Why do you think that is? I'm so curious cuz like you said, everyone needs to learn how to use this software. Whether it's the sales forces of the world or the newest, hottest SaaS marketing tool that's available. Why do you think some Cubs companies put off either certification or you know, educational centers? Why, why do you think that is?
Speaker 2:I don't really know why, but I, I, I will say I don't. I think a lot of companies are not thinking big enough. They don't think of, they think of creating a product to solve a problem for a person is what I think. And I might be insulting everyone that ever founded a software company, but in some sense, right, we have, I've noticed a problem in the world and maybe I've experienced it so I wanna solve it. And I go out and I'm an entrepreneur and I'm a risk taker and I figure out how to solve it and I can find customers willing to pay for it. And that's gigantic. But how many people are thinking 20 years down the line about just reinventing an industry, right? Let me just take this one step further. There are people, I think the world is changing so much that I could literally go get certified for free and maybe pay a little money in things that are advanced technologies, right? And get gigantically, highly paid jobs and never go to school.
Speaker 1:Definitely. There are certifications these days where for example, go Google ad, you can take a number of courses on Google ad. Then end up being at a large organization that values that because you know, you're the person that knows how to use ad sense like a wizard and, and you didn't even need to go through formal training for that. But there is a certification program that Google offers that makes you that wizard.
Speaker 2:So, and software companies have my level five maturity dream state, these software companies who are on the cutting edge of technology and are reinventing the way people will work, have an opportunity to reimagine education and take. I don't wanna insult educators, but like take over education, right? It's like if I can learn ADU and I can demonstrate on my GitHub profile that I can do Hadoop, you know, how many offers I'm gonna get by Thursday afternoon? Definitely. Is anyone gonna ask me if I went to North Carolina state or the sore bun? I don't think so. Like nobody cares.
Speaker 1:No. I think the, the proof is in the pudding there. Like once you know that ability or you have that ability totally. It doesn't matter where you went to school. It's more about how can you use this software or this technology that, you know, you are only trained in because we don't have anyone else on the business trained on this. How are you gonna help? And like you said, software companies can really define that because they can create academy certification programs and make really the employee indispensable because they ha they're the one of the few that have that knowledge.
Speaker 2:And just last thing I'll say on this is I know that software companies don't want to, you know, add services and an unrepeatable revenue streams, right. They wanna sell the software. I get it. There are software technology, training businesses that are more than a hundred million a year. New horizons project management Institute, I mean are gigantic training businesses. So I'm like, uh, we could probably, if our software covers enough jobs to be done, we could create a gigantic training business. And even if we're not making money on it, those people are all gonna buy our, buy our software.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely. And I think we've come like full circle on education right now. We talked about how you can get, get started when to get started, how to, you know, enable your customers. When do you use, oh yeah. Customer education for expansion versus new business. But I really wanna circle back to what we were kind of starting the conversation around, which is when does customer success need customer education? Like what is the evolution of education?
Speaker 2:There's lots the ways to answer this, right? At some point you need to special, you know, as a company gets bigger, their specialization is more required just in any topic. Right? And so, you know, if you're five CSMs and you have a hundred customers, a CSM can probably just help their 17 customers. Right. Definitely that's easy. But as your company gets bigger in number of employees, let's talk about that. Pretty soon. We need to get someone who can just do those, the webinars that we've been running for our customers like me as a CSM personally, every Thursday and Tuesday, I just like, maybe I just do my webinar thing and CU my, I invite my customers every week and I teach them stuff eventually that could be taken off of my plate and given to someone who could do do that as a full-time job. Right. Cuz the more of the education that I do, the less of customer success work that I can do. Right. That's one way to look at it. The second way is as our customer segments grow. So if I'm, I look at this in context of the technology adoption life cycle, you are, if you're selling to early adopters and the innovator types and that, right, those people have different personalities and they have different needs, right? They don't need your help as much, but you're gonna notice when you start selling into the early majority, which is, you know, the other side of the chasm. Okay, fine. But the early majority, that's 34% of the market of all the people who are gonna buy your stuff. Those people are gonna want help. And so I tell the story this way, you need to be ready for the day when you sell your first enterprise deal and you can't believe you did it. And it's it's what is it? It might be range Rover that buys from you or it might be, or it might be Telephonica. Like I can't believe they bought, we've been selling the small companies. And then the first thing they say is, okay, so you have training, right. You're gonna attach that to the proposal and you're so they're going, uh, I'm I'm in big trouble now. Well of course we have training, you know, and then the fire drill starts, but that's going to happen. Yeah. You're for not your first, but your first enterprise customers going to expect it's in their budget. And if you don't have an answer, you're in trouble, right? Yeah. So that could force you to do it or you could prepare for that. Right. And then et cetera. So that's, you know, does your, is your company growing well, you need to specialize more and are your customer, were segments growing to such a degree where you're getting to customer segments that need more support than just here's the help file for your implementation? Do it on your own, have fun.
Speaker 1:Definitely. Those are two great reasons obviously, to bring in customer education, like you said, at some point your CSMs are not gonna have the capacity to continue to educate their customers, or you're gonna move up more like you just said, and those large enterprises are gonna be like, Hey, we have 1000 people gonna be using your software. How do we mass make sure that they fully understand how to use, how to get value out of the software. And it's not gonna come from one CSM. It's gonna have to come from some sort of certification or education team, which makes complete sense. Totally. We could keep going on and on about this topic, bill, I can go in a number of different ways for us to continue the conversation. But wrapping up on the topic of customer education, a lot of people might be implementing it or starting it or even have it, but maybe they don't know how to measure it at the end of the day, like you said, it can be on a P and L and it can, bely a part of a business leaders team and like most PNLs or business leaders, they need to have measurable KPIs or data points to really show the value of customer education and to show how successful the education department is in your experience. What are some of those KPIs or metrics that are important to track when you are, uh, leading the customer education team?
Speaker 2:Well, okay. Back to my philosophy of starting small, right? You gotta focus your efforts, right? So the first thing, if you're doing training, you wanna know how many people did it. Yep. To start there. Right? Nothing else matters. Like everyone wants to leap to, well, how many people who took it, ended up buying more stuff from us and then by product family and by margin contribution, right? It's like, Ugh, gimme a break. No, one's even done it yet. So let's just start enrollments. If it's live training, how many people signed up, right. If it's, if it's your e-learning or your videos, how many people watched it, right. Just start do that until you really have a handle on some on knowing if we do something, how many people will probably do it? How many customers can we impact? Okay. That's just like level one, then you get into, okay, can we attach this to outcomes of any kind? Right. So on the four topics we talked about, so if, if our primary goal is to enable kind customers, then I would wanna know, are customers using the product differently after training? Right? What does that mean? Log in more, add more users, click more, you know, whatever, create more opportunities. If it's a Salesforce, like if it's community software is our or more people, are there more posts and more replies, right. Or whatever the metrics are. Are there more, is there more use yep. In it, if you're enabling, if your goal is to grow customers and educate, we talked about that. Right. Then you wanna start measuring, okay. Customers who took training, did they buy more stuff? Yep. Right. So you can link LMSs to, uh, CRMs and correlate that data and see if there's any patterns that could be done. And if you wanna win customers, right. You're out in the public. What you wanna do is say, if we have public training, do those students, whether e-learning or live training, do they become leads in our marketing software or do they be, and those do those leads become customers. Right? And then if you're fancy, you can say, does that speed up the sales cycle? If you measure velocity, right. Oh my God. It's not a three month deal cycle anymore. It's two months and 29 days.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I love that. And starting small is super critical. Like you said, everything, you just said it started small. It's like, okay, how many people watch this video? Did they a watch 10%, 50%, a hundred percent of it. Like, that's a great metric to start training. And then it just depends, I guess, on the business itself and what they wanna get out of customer education
Speaker 2:And just add to it over time.
Speaker 1:Yep. Love it. Amazing. Okay. Let's jump into our quickfire question round, which we'll wrap up this conversation. I wanna challenge you to try to answer the next few questions in a sentence or less. If you do it, bill, you'll be my first guest that does it. No pressure, but uh, let's see how you do. So my first question is what do you think is next for the customer success industry?
Speaker 2:NRR is going to take over the world.
Speaker 1:Well said it also ought track for a sentence or less. Let's see if you can keep it up. The next question is what is your favorite software or app on your phone that you can't live without
Speaker 2:Strava?
Speaker 1:You're a runner. Okay. Actually that was a follow up, but I'm guessing you're a runner if you're using Strava. Awesome. Next question is what is your favorite CS or customer education book?
Speaker 2:Adam ARA. MECU wrote customer education. That's my favorite education book.
Speaker 1:Awesome. And what sort of compensation should a customer success manager get? Should they just have a base salary or a base plus commission? This goes for customer education as well.
Speaker 2:Base salary plus bonuses based on NRR. That is above a hundred percent.
Speaker 1:Last question you're doing so well. You really might me my first that does this in one sentence or less. So last question is what is your favorite part of customer success or customer education?
Speaker 2:Helping my customer go into that management meeting with the report. And they're ready to say our team produced this work and here are the results.
Speaker 1:Amazing. That was a little bit longer than a sentence, but I'll take it. I think you're the first guest that did all of that in a sentence or less.
Speaker 2:I think I used the comma.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Awesome. You so much bill for your insights coming on, chatting with me today and sharing all your knowledge with our audience. If they have any further questions or if anybody wants to get in touch, what's the best way to reach out to you?
Speaker 2:LinkedIn bill Kard you'll find me. That's the best place. Okay. It all goes down to the DMS.
Speaker 1:Your heard it here. Slide into Bill's DMS and he'll answer your questions, but thank you so much bill for your time. Really appreciate it. And shedding so much knowledge and sharing so much with us today.
Speaker 2:Oh, this is a pleasure, Monica. Thank you for having me.
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