Speaker 1: Welcome to Mixology, the intersection of customer education and customer marketing. I'm Christine Cookage, and along with Shannon Howard, we'll talk about how customer education and customer marketing are the scale engines of customer success. Mixology is all about how ingredients combine to bring surprising results. And today we'll use the paper plane as our mixology concoction at Shannon's suggestion. The ingredients are simple, ¾ oz of whiskey, ¾ oz Aperol, which is just a more citrusy version of Campari and made by the same company, ¾ oz lemon juice, and some bitters to taste. Fill your shaker with ice, load up the ingredients, and shake until you feel the cold. Strain it into a gimlet glass. Let's get started. And this is episode four. In the last episode, and the one before that, we were talking about go-to-market, and how customer education and customer marketing are a part of that overall organizational effort, and then how they play with education as product, which brings us to now, right, where we talk about the structure of education and how to build your product through the three big things that we know and love, iteration, cross-functional collaboration, and customer outcomes, right? And then how the marketing is the communication engine, right, of all of that as we go. So I think you had the best example of the structure for iteration, right, Shannon, when we were talking about just, again, don't build it and assume they'll come, but treat this like a regular product.

Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think when we're thinking product development, that, and especially if you work in B2B SaaS, you know this, is we're iterating constantly. And so, and I was just talking with somebody about this earlier today around, you know, when HubSpot Academy, and everybody points to HubSpot Academy as the epitome of customer education, but it was a series of webinars in the beginning. It was not what we know and love today. It was a series of webinars. And so that was their MVP. They started there, saw that there was interest, learned from their customer base, what was working, not working, what they wanted, and then they started to build it out, and they continue to do that. And so they're building, testing, iterating as they go, much like you would do for a traditional product. And I think when we think about education that way, it keeps us from this need to kind of get it right and have the perfect program, you know, the perfect initiative. We're just, you know, we're putting something out there and getting feelers. And Christine, I know you've, you've done a lot of training in customer education. And so I'm curious to hear your perspective of how you've kind of grown and developed programs over time.

Speaker 1: I think that, that Dave Darrington said it best, right? Iteration is easiest because you have to get something out there. If you, if you let perfection hold you back, you'll never get anything done. No. And it's so true. And for me, video is easiest, right? I do video, like, yeah, so I can pop a video out in, you know, a couple of days and be done with it. After that, we need more. And so the next iteration might be the actual development of student exercises so we can get some on-demand, hands-on experiences. The next iteration might be a scripted kind of ILT so that we could SME deliver, right? So we could, we're not reliant necessarily on just the training team, if you have one, if you have instructors to do this. And then the final version might be the, the VILT, ILT extravaganza, which allows us to leverage our best people in the delivery. But it's also the hardest one to build because there's so many components to it. So you don't have to strive for that as your first try, right? It could be documentation and not, it doesn't have to be video, to be honest. I just like it because it's easy. And for me, documentation is harder. It's just, it's, there's more components to that from, in my book.

Speaker 2: Well, and, well, it kind of makes me think too, right? Like I've seen some academies out there that are just written content. I've gone through a couple of things where it's just written content. And then there's some where it's just recorded video or my favorite is just recorded webinars and they're just throwing them in there. Okay. Timeout. Like throwing a webinar in an academy is not education. It's not.

Speaker 1: It's not a bad. What is, what does Pam say just today? I was talking with Pam and it was telling is not training.

Speaker 2: Telling is not training. No. And so yes. Okay. So now that we, we put that out there, the whole world knows putting a bunch of webinars does not an academy make, but yeah, you can start small and you can just turn on your camera. And when you even look at the evolution of video, like vlogs or podcasts, the audio quality was crap in the beginning, but they just started recording and then they improved over time. And everybody that I follow who does a lot of content creation is just like get started and you're going to have some crappy work in the beginning. Whether it's video, audio written, the better it will get. And you have room to grow in that over time. But I think we forget people are very forgiving of your audio quality or your video quality. As long as the content's good, let's just focus on delivering, providing great content. That's actually valuable and interesting to people. And then, and then forget the rest. But if we get hung up on, and I was spoiled, right? My, my introduction to education was curriculum development. We had an in-house video studio with incredible like audio technicians and video people.

Speaker 1: Producers and yeah.

Speaker 2: You're in makeup. I looked way better than this on camera. But, you know, but that's not the expectation. Like nobody is watching this video expecting that someone spent an hour and a half doing my hair and makeup, but that's, you know, we kind of get hung up.

Speaker 1: I hope not. Because I certainly didn't spend that much time.

Speaker 2: Okay, so we want to build iteratively. That's part of it. We also talked about cross-functional collaboration, and this is such a huge part. We talked about the intersection of customer marketing and customer education. A key part of that is scale. These are both functions of scale. But they also collaborate with all these other teams. I really don't think that you can put together an effective customer education or customer marketing strategy. If you haven't talked to product, customer success, sales, support, and all these different teams. So when you're thinking about customer education being a product and these working with these cross-functional teams and what comes to mind for you as super important or maybe even something that we, you know, tend to forget about or get wrong.

Speaker 1: One of the biggest issues we always run into is SME availability. In the beginning, in particular, our education teams may not be product literate enough to be a SME. Over time, they will become that, truthfully. We all become experts in what we teach or what we build content for. That's just a part of it. But in the beginning, you have to find your SMEs from those other places, from support, from your customer success teams, from the product team. And what you need to do is figure out how to manage their involvement in the easiest way possible. So that if they want to be this person, let them be this person. On camera, doing what they do, they're dynamic, it's great. If they want to be this person and they're not a dynamic presenter, it can be a challenge because you want people to watch the content. You don't want people to watch the content and never come back because they didn't like the presenter. And that's not a bad thing. It's a thing we learned from.

Speaker 2: That is, I definitely learned the hard way. You can have someone who is so knowledgeable about something and does not know how to present it in a way that other people understand. And this is where I really, you know, I've talked before with people about what is the difference between content writing and education writing because there's a difference. There's a difference when you're writing for SEO, when you're writing thought leadership content, when you're writing different kinds of marketing content, and then you're creating educational content. It's different. And the way that you approach it is different. And so we want to be mindful of that, that, you know, people could be subject matter experts, but they're not the greatest at laying it out. They're not the greatest at teaching other people. Maybe they're not the most dynamic presenter. That's fine. We don't, you know, that would be like a unicorn person, really, if they had all these gifts and talents. But how do we kind of get that from people and help them, you know, like, how do we help them share their knowledge and expertise and then deliver it in a way that's appealing to the customer?

Speaker 1: And that showcases their knowledge and not that not the delivery mechanism. Right. Yeah. And that's I think that's one of the biggest parts of the cross functional is, is finding those SMEs and identifying where they're strong and where they're not because as the people building the surrounding information, whether it's education or marketing, I can I can hover up or support the areas where they're weak so that they can shine in the areas where they're strong. Right. And we have that. We have the ability to do that when we mix the education and the marketing as the support options to that scale, whatever that happens to be.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So we've got the SME aspect of cross functional collaboration. And then I think kind of like with a product, right, product wants, want, should want to hear from sales. Hey, what is the market asking for? What questions do you get? What are they going maybe to a competitor for? And they should be asking CS, hey, what are the questions that you answer over and over? What are your customers asking about? What are they interested in? And and they should be talking to marketing about, you know, hey, what's our positioning? What are we trying to grow into? Right. What is if everybody in their mom is doing a category right now? So like, how do we grow into the category? Right. So they're thinking about all this cross functional input to inform product development and education should be the same way to like support. Hey, what are those questions that you're asked, answering over and over again, customer success? What are those things that you're telling your customers and training them on over and over? What would be Yeah, what are the most common objections or things that you have to overcome? Maybe there is an opportunity there for education to do more of the heavy lifting of helping them get to where we want them to be. Whether it is kind of understanding what our category is or what our product does, there can be components for education there. And then the last thing we have was being outcomes focused. And, and, yeah, I think this is a huge shift for people in general, from output to outcomes. And especially with the our current kind of macro economic environment, people are thinking less about what am I doing so much as what is it driving? And so you think about outcomes and how we think about outcomes in developing customer education as a product, you know, where's your head at? How do you think about that?

Speaker 1: It always comes back to history, right? We had objectives before, and you would build your content around an objective. And the evolution has said that we're no longer dictating an objective. We are creating content to reach an outcome for the customer based on their particular workflow. And that shift has been truly evolutionary. I mean, it's only something that's, that's, I think, come to the forefront in the last, I don't know, two and a half years, maybe. But the idea behind that is, it's still an objective. What we've done is we've just flipped it from the start to looking at, here's what the end should look like. We have a goal in mind. How do we get there? And, and that's what the education does, right, is it builds that roadmap on the how we get there. And then of course, marketing can do the shout outs in between.

Speaker 2: So almost reverse engineering our success and saying like, I don't know, I guess the example that just came to mind, and this is probably because our neighbors were just potty training, it's like potty training, there's an outcome, right? There's an end goal of like, you can wear underwear. Right. And, and so like, but then we're reverse engineering, what do they need to know? Well, they need to know what these sensations are, they need to know how to ask to go to the bathroom, they need to, you know, there's these steps that they have, and education is helping them getting there. That's such a weird, now I feel bad, like people are thinking about potty training. But right, I think about like, just really practical things that that people can relate to have been through. But we're starting with this end goal. And we're not just saying the objective is that you know, when you have to go to the bathroom, no, what we want is for you to be diaper free, my friend. So that's the outcome that we're looking for. And then there's these different maybe milestones that we reach along the way. And that we marketing high fives, and we say, good job, you went to the bathroom, here's an M&M. So you have those milestones, and we're high fiving them. Now I'm loving this analogy. But then you're right, objectives, too. But you're really thinking about that end goal. You're not just thinking about, hey, did you exactly and

Speaker 1: the work product, right? Because in the world that we inhabit, it's, I need to be able to understand how this affects my job. Right? If my goal is to decrease X number by 12% by the end of this year, how does this tool help me get there?

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Right. And that's the outcome that the end outcome is the 12% increase or decrease or whatever, right? And, and how education can lead us through the right path to get there. And marketing communicates along the way, right? The pluses, the minuses, and of course, the high fives, right? Because it's important to get recognition for reaching a milestone. It's, it's, that's a, that's a big deal. And let's make sure that everybody understands that's a big deal. So.

Speaker 2: So we have, so we're thinking about customer education as a product, we're treating it that way. In the sense that, you know, we're having a product mindset, we're building iteratively, we're testing over time, we're getting, we're working cross functionally, to get input to socialize things to get subject matter expertise and figure out the best way, right? We're kind of translating maybe between teams. And then we're thinking about outcomes. And we're thinking about what are these outcomes we're driving for the business? What are we driving for the customer? And then how do we celebrate the progress toward that showcase the progress toward that along the way? And then, you know, kind of going back to our previous episode, how do we kind of go to market with this? How do we make sure that people know that we have these education initiatives and how they can access them? And yeah, where they can find things throughout their lifecycle, whether they're maybe a prospect, or they're a new customer or longtime customer.

Speaker 1: Or new to this company as with a company has been around for a while as a customer, but employees change over time. So

Speaker 2: we should totally revisit that because that's so real.

Speaker 1: Yeah, that's another one. And we'll add that one to the list. So this time, define your product, iterate it, cross functional, focus on the outcomes. Next time, let us talk about value quickly. Let's talk about how we can use CE and CM to, to establish value in a speedy way. Time to first value, one of my favorite metrics ever. All right, guys, see you next time. Good to see this time. Later.