The Digital CX Podcast: Driving digital customer success and outcomes in the age of A.I.

Customer Education for Revenue Growth with Greg Rose of Intellum | Episode 062

• Alex Turkovic, Greg Rose • Episode 62

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Ever wondered how mastering customer education can lead to skyrocketing revenue? Listen in as we sit down with Greg Rose of Intellum, who takes us on his extraordinary journey from running a record label to pioneering the field of customer education. You'll learn the magic of Education Qualified Leads (EQLs) and how they can turbocharge your conversion rates. Greg also shares invaluable leadership gems from his memorable Pulse talk, "Everything I Learned About Leadership I Learned from Fred Rogers and My Dad," blending personal anecdotes with professional wisdom.

We also talk about:

  • 00:00 - Driving revenue through education
  • 02:26 - Music and customer education
  • 06:59 - Leadership lessons from Fred Rogers
  • 07:59 - Brain science in sales
  • 11:05 - The problem with sales handoffs
  • 17:42 - Balancing micro-learning and mastery
  • 19:08 - Two pillars of education strategy
  • 27:18 - Challenges in measuring ROI
  • 30:13 - Forrester’s findings on customer education
  • 32:35 - The importance of strategic planning
  • 36:59 - Defining an education qualified lead
  • 40:10 - Impact of the pandemic on education
  • 44:11 - Strategies for measuring impact
  • 46:17 - Building relationships for data access
  • 47:16 - Benefits of education moving to marketing
  • 49:02 - Avoiding mistakes in education strategy
  • 50:56 - The importance of reach and frequency

Enjoy! I know I sure did...

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This episode was edited and sponsored by Lifetime Value Media, a media production company founded by my good friend and fellow CS veteran Dillon Young.  Lifetime Value aims to serve the audio/video content production and editing needs of CS and Post-Sales professionals.  Lifetime Value is offering select services at a deeply discounted rate for a limited time.  Navigate to lifetimevaluemedia.com to learn more.

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The Digital Customer Success Podcast is hosted by Alex Turkovic

Speaker 1:

When you can say we're going to create an initiative that's aimed at this cross-sell opportunity and then you can demonstrate that when users are fully educated, they are more likely to agree to cross-sell or up-sell. Now you're driving revenue. The ones that are ahead here are the ones that have established a definition for an education-qualified lead and now they're testing the impact of how likely an educated EQL is to convert to SQO than a marketing hold.

Speaker 2:

Once again, welcome to the Digital Customer Experience podcast with me, Alex Turkovich. So glad you could join us here today and every week as we explore how digital can help enhance the customer and employee experience. My goal is to share what my guests and I have learned over the years so that you can get the insights that you need to evolve your own digital programs. If you'd like more info, need to get in touch or sign up for the weekly companion newsletter that has additional articles and resources in it. Go to digitalcustomersuccesscom. For now, let's get started and welcome back to the Digital CX Podcast. It's Alex Tergovich. I'm so glad to see you back Today.

Speaker 2:

We have a phenomenal guest lined up for you in Greg Rose of Intellum, which is a customer education focused platform, and so naturally, we talk about customer education. But he's also a phenomenal leader and a phenomenal post-sale and revenue leader, so we get into all manner of different things. You may know him from a Pulse talk he gave a few years ago which is titled Everything I Learned About Leadership I learned from Fred Rogers and my dad Very entertaining, and he's entertaining on this show as well. So, yeah, we talk about all kinds of different fun things, including music customer education. You know we talk about how YouTube University has kind of replaced mastery in a lot of ways. So very cool, very engaging conversation with Greg Rose that I certainly enjoyed and I hope you do too. Hey, greg, I wanted to welcome you to the show. It's been a while Been a little bit in the making. We made it happen, but I'm super excited that you're on Glad to be here.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I'm psyched.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, we made it happen but I'm super excited that you're on. Yeah, I'm psyched. Yeah, we learned about each other, I think kind of tangentially and roughly at the same time, but one of the things that we have crazy in common is just music in our history. I think you were saying that you ran a record label.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Berkeley did the audio engineer thing. And here we are in customer education, customer success, customer post-sale market, whatever we want to call it Like. Here we are. Tell me a little bit about that, your journey out of, out of music and into like where we are.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, I um, so I I consider myself an amateur musician. I didn't choose to do that as a career. I have a love for music. It's all around us in our house all the time. I did start a record label that was based here in Atlanta and we ran it for many years. It was awesome. I love the business, I love the bands, bands, I love making music. So all of that was like it was like really great.

Speaker 1:

I have a second life, which is growth, and I I also aside from music and dabbling in that. In that space I also did this growth thing. So, from a journey perspective, I think when I I'm old, I got out of school at the end of the 90s and this internet thing was happening, sounded like a good place to go work. I was doing it actually started in advertising in the tech space and jumped into PR pretty quickly because that was the strategy In the early 2000s. Tech brands were growing primarily through media relations, not through advertising, so I got involved in that.

Speaker 1:

I did that for a long time. That kind of transitioned into two things like broader marketing strategy and then also a lot of like direct work with customers, and I think that work was sort of like from a marketing perspective understanding the customer, understanding the use case, being able to leverage that to to present new customers, to, to demonstrate what's possible with whatever product or service that we're selling. At the time kind of default got me into helping to manage the customer. Yeah, sure, before, before I'd really before I was really aware of things like customer experience right, I was doing a lot of that work and just calling it growth, so that that experience kind of runs the gamut across industries. Tech is really the the unifying theme. And then about 10 years ago not nine and some change, I got the opportunity to come to Intellum.

Speaker 1:

And the Intellum move. Really, let me take all of these experiences from a brand building perspective and a messaging and positioning perspective, from a customer interaction and management perspective, really pull all those things together under this larger concept and strategy of education and for me, I just I sort of landed in something that pretty quickly. I realized two things, like one I'm very passionate about. I think we're going to talk a little bit more about the ins and outs of education today, sure, but also just recognizing that I've gotten to the point where I believe that education is marketing and it is support and it is success. It's all of these things rolled up into whatever we want to call it. For me, the term I'm using is customer experience, but I think terminology doesn't matter. It's about how we support our client.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's kind of table stakes right, Like it's all well and good to like sell a great product and have a great product and all that kind of stuff, but if you're not, if you're not teaching them how to fish, then they're not fishing. That's cool, um so cool. I uh, I watched your pulse talk about. Correct me if I'm wrong. It's like everything I learned about leadership from Fred Rogers and my dad right, that's true.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that was a good one. Some really fascinating points, that kind of toe the line between Fred Rogers, but then also like fundamental, like brain science and talking about the chemicals of the brain and all that kind of stuff. And the whole time I was listening to it I kept thinking about, okay, yes, everything I learned about leadership. But you could apply the entirety of that talk, which is I'll link it down below if anybody wants to go watch it, which you should but the entirety of the talk I think you could directly apply to customer experience as well and working with customers, because it's the same. I mean, you should be in a leadership position with your customers and a thought leadership position, but then also from an education standpoint. And one thing that you said that really rung true with me was this notion of like attitudes are caught, not taught and attitudes should be caught from a brand and CE perspective as well.

Speaker 1:

So I'm curious if you've kind of implemented some of that stuff into your kind of day-to-day as well from a customer facing perspective yeah I I, I think so it's interesting to I hadn't thought about this, but to go back to the, to that talk and then kind of like, connect the dots into this, this idea of customer education and customer experience where we're talking about today, I'll today, I'll answer it this way, I'll sort of build on, I think, kind of what I was talking about generally from a leadership perspective as it relates to, I think, where we find ourselves today in the broad customer success, customer experience environment.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

I'll say something incendiary, and I don't mean bring it out like I'm pointing fingers or anything but like, like sales has sales has evolved. I think we're in a new, we're in a new sort of sales motion. I think we've gone, I think we've gone past the the art of the possible, which is, I think, a way that we really, you know, sort of over the last several years, we're really focused on like, look at what you can do. I think it's morphed a little bit, a trend that I see and I talk to friends and peers and network folks about this too, to ensure that I'm not making this up that it's actually really happy to have a lot of people saying, yes, they agree. I think, from a sales perspective, doing a little bit of brain science, manipulation, and I think what we're doing is tapping into the personal motivations, the career growth and the aspirations of the buyer.

Speaker 1:

So we're not just saying like hey, buyer, look, you own a customer success motion. Look at what's possible from a data perspective if you do customer education. Everybody, every customer education related tech company in the world, is saying that. I think it's yeah staying across different tech areas of focus is some smarter salespeople, some forward-leaning companies are tapping into the, the individual, and they're saying listen, alex, like tell me about, tell me about your current remit and tell me where you want to go.

Speaker 1:

And so you start talking about, like what your goals are as a CE or a CS or a sales support type leader, and I think salespeople now are saying well, that's great to lay out a vision for you that demonstrates how you're going to use us as an advisor to get to this next career jump or this next role, or demonstrate this impact on the business. I don't think that's bad, I think that's actually really smart and I think if it's done from an authentic place, it could be a great way to build the relationship. The problem that I see today is that sales is like tapping into Alex's personal aspirations and making these sort of connections between utilizing the thing they're selling and your ability to hit your personal goals, Not the departmental goals like your personal career goals.

Speaker 1:

And then they step aside and our implementation teams and our CS teams pick up this new client who the buyer has turned it over to her team to implement. The sales guy has turned it over to her team to implement. The sale guy's turned it over to his team to implement. They start doing the work fast forward to the end of the year and you've got a bunch of employees who are saying that they can't achieve the outcome that the buyer bought using the tool.

Speaker 1:

There's something broken there. Buyer bought using the tool. There's something broken there. And I think I think when I, when I think back to the like the way I was laying out the brain science and thinking about attitude being caught and stuff, like then I think about where we are from CE. One thing I think we've got to be working on is that thing that I think is broken the how we're selling it again. We kind of were there, we kind of got through it and now it's like maybe we're back, like we're selling this vision and we're not doing a great job of making sure that the buyer's vision is achieved.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, it's like I'm trying to draw an analogy here, but it's, it's kind of.

Speaker 1:

I mean doing that work, by the way, is an attitude that gets caught. Yeah, we should be promoting that sense that it's not just about getting the client onboarding and utilizing the platform. It's actually about us believing, as a company, that we're going to help that client achieve this sort of personal aspiration that we sold them.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean I think that practically everybody who listens to this podcast can resonate with that fact of, look, we've sold this thing to an individual who is nowhere to be found post-sale.

Speaker 2:

And that individual maybe checks in a year later and is like well, what's going on here? In the meantime, it's up to the post-sale teams to really dig in and say, look, this isn't just speeds and feeds stuff. What do you as an organization want to achieve and obviously there's career elements to that too as individuals, but like that, that digging in post-sale, to really understand, like, what are the challenges. And then, from an education standpoint, it's like, sure, we need to give you some speeds and feeds and some how to's and some all that kind of stuff. But fundamentally, if you want to achieve X, this is what you're going to need to do with your organization and your operations and your data and your blah blah blah and your blah blah blah to make it happen and be a. I guess what I'm saying is you got to be consultative about the whole thing versus why not? I mean.

Speaker 1:

I'm sure we're going to get into this. I don't want to. I don't want to to to jump the gun, but I think there's a conversation we're probably going to have in a few minutes about where we'll dig into the strategy behind the education and why we educate on some things. There's two sides to that story and I am hoping we get a chance to get into that today.

Speaker 2:

We're getting into it right now. My friend, let's go.

Speaker 1:

I don't want to leave the conversation. I will follow. I will follow your talk. I could.

Speaker 2:

Just I could take well, look, I mean, I mean, one of the things that we did talk about a little while ago and I think you and I are both pretty passionate about is this concept of what kind of youtube university has done to our way of learning. Because there's people out there like Gary Vaynerchuk and a bunch of other people myself included actually that kind of are like what really is the ROI of higher education, because unless you're wanting to become a brain surgeon or a lawyer, you really need all that kind of stuff and it's like just go to YouTube and learn some stuff. But at the same time, there's this fascinating book that I just read Shop Class as a Soul Craft. Highly recommend it. It's by this guy named Matthew B Crawford, no-transcript, from the United States. Like, if you wanna go buy some really cheap equipment, go to like school auctions and stuff like that, because they're shutting down shop classes left and right. It's crazy.

Speaker 2:

I don't know if that makes much sense, but that's disappointing and kind of crazy it's so disappointing and so like, when I think about how this manifests itself, like we're kind of becoming this land of generalists a little bit and we can dabble in XYZ, but when it comes to like education especially, I think there's like there is this notion that hey look, there's great tools, generative AIs out there, like a lot of great innovations are coming at us at a quicker and quicker pace, but the fundamentals and the fundamental truth of how humans learn and how humans ingest is like the craft that still needs to be there and that human to human connection still needs to be there. So I don't know where I'm going with this, but I think that juxtaposition between YouTube, university and like mastery is huge.

Speaker 1:

I've got. I've got a really okay. So I I we did have a great conversation about this a while ago and I let's, let's bring it back. I think this is is is exciting and fascinating and really cool, and I have a really great client story to tell. I think all of that's true, and I think there's probably there who are not. Probably there's tons of of research and literature that you can find about the impact of the pros and the cons of micro learning and bite-sized learning, and against the more traditional sort of series of steps that get you to some expertise in a topic. I think, if we apply that, though, to business, if we think about it from a corporate education standpoint Like I don't there's nothing wrong with bite-sized education activities. There's nothing wrong with YouTube, using YouTube.

Speaker 1:

We all use YouTube. Every company world now has its own YouTube presence and is feeding content and videos and podcasts like this and everything else is going into YouTube and like, maybe in a minute we'll come back to this idea of search and the ocean of content. But I mean, I think when I talk with clients that are doing this really well, they're not really focused on bite-sized video. That's not really the way the conversation unfolds. Really, what we're talking about in most instances is education strategy and it's got two main pillars. There is should be formalized curriculum. This is content that is sequenced into context and it's leading the learner towards mastery of a topic or a skill or a concept.

Speaker 1:

Generally. There's some assessment or test or quiz at the end or throughout the thing, depending on its complexity and size, and then you're able, as a learner, to demonstrate proficiency and, at the end of that experience, demonstrate that you understand what you were just taught. And I think, from a corporate education perspective we didn't talk about that we have learning paths and we have courses and we have certifications, and I think all of that is valid and important and that is one pillar of a successful strategy. The second pillar is things that you can group into this bucket of reference materials. To me, these are the one-off videos, the recorded webinars, live webinars, live events, live training, things that stand alone, knowledge-based articles, reference guides, all of those things you could sort of bucket into this category called reference.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, or like performance support kind of stuff.

Speaker 1:

Totally All the support documentation itself. I mean, you've got curriculum as a pillar, and that is part of the strategy. You've now got reference material, and that's part of the strategy, and I think what you're really trying to do, then, is create this environment where a learner has the opportunity to find the thing she's looking for, and so it may be that I am trying to learn a complex concept. Maybe I really want to understand a fundamental concept that's tied to the way I'm supposed to use this new software that we bought. Maybe I want to get certified as an admin on the software we just bought, and there are different motivations for those things which we can dig into too.

Speaker 1:

That's a time commitment, and it's probably going to happen in a series of steps. I'm probably not going to sit in front of the computer for six hours, but I will sort of invest in the six hours over time. That's something very different than I need to know how you guys handle API webhooks, and so I'm going to come into the destination. I'm going to be like API webhooks into the search bar, and I want to see the places where I can get the answer to my question.

Speaker 1:

This touches on another thing we can dig into too, but like okay, so you've got curriculum, you've got reference material. I think what we're really talking about is I don't want to get hyper fixated on whether a bite-sized video or a YouTube-like experience is right or wrong. I think the question is what is the education strategy? How are you using those two pillars strategy? How are you using those two pillars? What is the learner experience then that you are? What do you? What learner experience are you leading that learner through? How are you making sure that she's getting to the right content when she needs it? And then it's like how much of that is inside curriculum, how much of that is is standalone in some kind of of easy to get to reference?

Speaker 1:

I think, when YouTube-like videos that are specific about something are available and are directly related to what that person is looking for, it's wonderful. It's like the best way to get to information.

Speaker 2:

I think showing that person how it fits into a broader curriculum or or the concept is also available in this is also really important yeah, you know I'm thinking about this in the context of, obviously you know of a solid digital strategy, because you got a part of it is like distributing the right content to the right person at the right time in the place where they are, between customer education and, we'll say, ce blankets, like all of those resources, whether it be full-blown courseware or knowledge-based articles or whatever but customer resources tied together with a solid digital strategy is really hard to nail down, sometimes outside of like an onboarding flow or a pre-renewal flow, but like if your customer is like trying to predict your customer is struggling with XYZ, or I think this person probably needs this or whatever. Do you have any insight into, like, how to tie those things in programmatically in an effective way?

Speaker 1:

Yes, I have a lot. Okay, we'll see you later. Folks. I think so. Alex, you can step away now and I'll talk for the next 40 minutes and lecture on the ideas of strategy and ROI. If we accept this idea that we've got these sort of like two main pillars, there's actually a third. We think there's a third. There's curriculum, there's reference materials. I think there's also a clear use case and a need for something that's more interactive. So we think about it like an educated or an education dedicated forum. You can call it community. That word has a lot of give me, a lot of different things to a lot of different companies. So I'm not talking about launching another community. I'm saying inside the education environment. Allowing two customers to talk to each other about the things learning in the environment becomes another way to make sure that that user or learner is getting to the right thing she needs at that time.

Speaker 2:

So if I can get curriculum.

Speaker 1:

If I can see the reference material, then I can see that somebody actually asked this question and there's a bunch of answers to the specific question I'm asking. I can also be about it and you're doing it right. You're then the community manager, the forum managers. They're doing a good job of referencing back into the curriculum. To me that's like the whole thing. It's like, if we can get into that virtuous cycle, like you're doing something really right, the thing I and pull me back if I'm going in the wrong direction here but I think really what we're starting to get to is like how do you take education strategy and turn it into ROI? I think that's what we're. And again, if you, if you want to.

Speaker 2:

Sure no, it's absolutely.

Speaker 1:

You want to go in a different direction.

Speaker 2:

No, this is great because because hey, I want to have a brief chat with you about this show. Did you know that roughly 60% of listeners aren't actually subscribed to the show, on whatever platform they're listening to it on? As you know, algorithms love, likes, follows, subscribes, comments, all of that kind of stuff. So if you get value out of the content, you listen regularly and you want to help others to discover the content as well, please go ahead and follow the show, leave a comment, leave a review. Anything that you want to do there really helps us to grow organically as a show. And while you're at it, go sign up for the companion newsletter that goes out every week at digitalcustomersuccesscom.

Speaker 1:

Now back to the show.

Speaker 2:

It's great because getting to ROI like pinning ROI on learning and training is an insanely difficult thing.

Speaker 1:

It's hard. It can be hard I don't think it needs to be is because I think how to get the content in front of the person is certainly important and it's a big part of the initiative. I think it's secondary. I think there's something that comes before how do we make sure that our digital strategies align and that the content's appearing in the right places? And we can talk through that for sure. I think I alluded to this a little bit earlier. There's so saying it slightly differently. I think, where internal education folks, they are delivering content like compliance related things, skills content, they're helping learners level up. I mean all of that can be measured and justified. On things like completions, like more of your employees doing the thing, and so it's like that's a good thing and we, we, we, we tie it to employee engagement and satisfaction. It's good. Yeah, when we're doing things that touch customers, it's not enough.

Speaker 1:

And it's especially not enough right now. So we all know that we've got friends and colleagues that are being downsized. Teams are being downsized, they're being moved. There's just a lot of flux right now in education and I think it's more important now than ever that we can point to ROI.

Speaker 2:

Yeah because I mean, like, ultimately, you've got some in. I mean, if you're in the luxury of being in a SaaS or supporting a SaaS platform that, like, has maybe four outcomes intended outcomes for most customers that's a luxurious place to be because then you can like programmatically say, look to get to here, take these courses, this blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, boom. And then you can measure like, okay, uptake and feature and all that kind of stuff. But, like the reality of it is is that I don't know very many people that live in that kind of environment, because we're supporting multiple products and in some cases some are on-prem and not SaaS and all over here and you've got agents, blah, blah, blah and customizations and all this kind of stuff, which is where the whole thing gets just crazy.

Speaker 1:

So I came armed with a little bit of data today.

Speaker 2:

And.

Speaker 1:

I'll share it now, just three bullet points. So we're in a second round of research with Forrester, so we just published it. You can go to the Intel site, you can get it. It talks about the economic impact of customer education.

Speaker 1:

So it goes through in great detail what successful companies are seeing. And so the three that I pulled out for today are that, when executed correctly, on average successful companies are seeing a 35% increase in average lifetime value of a customer. When they're fully educated, dang. They're seeing a 30% increase in closed one opportunities, which I want to come back to in a minute. They're seeing a 25% increase in customer retention. So those are great and those are the kind of numbers we all want to be able to stand in front of the board or stand in front of leadership and say this program that I own or that I help drive is making this kind of impact.

Speaker 1:

The challenge again is correlating the consumption of what we see in the actual learning environment, the engagement, the completion, the assessment scores. How do you take that and turn that into average lifetime value? How do you turn that into customer retention? How do you use education to reduce cost, like? That's another thing where there are massive costs cutting through education.

Speaker 1:

And I think what I don't see enough of when I look, I'll have a wonderful advantage I get to look across a bunch of programs, like as a practitioner. We might have experience with two or three places where we've worked. I get to look across like two to 300 at a time, which is a wonderful place to sit and look at trends and patterns and all that stuff. And I think that one of the things that we recognize the companies that achieve these kinds of impacts, they sort of they don't fall there accidentally and they certainly don't try at the end of the year or before the next board meeting or when there's suddenly rumors of an impending rift. They don't start then trying to dig into data like completions and magically divine some kind of correlation. And magically divine some kind of correlation. They start the beginning of their training year with a plan. Yeah, the plan is built off the business outcome that they think is the most important during this year to the company.

Speaker 1:

So, generally, those are things like driving more revenue or cutting costs yeah and we can use the cost, cutting one as an example, because it's easy to talk through. So what I watch these teams do is they say, okay, this year we're going to focus a chunk of our time on cost reduction. And then then they say, all right, from an education perspective, what initiatives are most likely to lead to a reduction in cost? And so they'll say, well, we have been working with the support team and support is recognizing a massive increase in tickets right now. Okay, so the education team could form a hypothesis. We think that there's all these tickets related to the platform We've noticed they're all primarily year one year, two users.

Speaker 1:

We think that onboarding we would have looked at onboarding. Onboarding wasn't very good, so we think that's the problem. We think the onboard content is not comprehensive enough, or it's not updated enough, or it's not engaging enough, whatever that is. They're going to then work on creating an onboarding initiative that is aimed at ticket reduction. So they're going to look at the patterns and trends they see in the tickets. They're going to use that to influence the creation of a new onboarding initiative. They're going to run that to influence the creation of a new onboarding initiative. They're going to run the onboarding initiative. They're going to get to the six-month mark and they're going to say, of the users that completed, of the new customers who completed the new onboarding content, are they more likely or less likely to submit a ticket compared to the new users who took the previous onboarding content? We know the average cost of a ticket. When you can demonstrate that the subset of users submits way less tickets, you've made the kind of impact on cost reduction that it's still a correlation, but it's a pretty strong one.

Speaker 1:

You can do the same thing with revenue. You can look at your cross sell and upsell strategies. As a company education team. You get with sales, get with the growth team, understand what the cross sell and upsell goals are, what the what, what their strategies are for doing that. You can look at the big chunk of content that onboarding is always an option here. Certification can be an option here. There's this big bracket of like general skills and enablement type content where you're just teaching people about the platform. But when you begin to define a learning initiative that's aimed and by initiative I mean content that's organized specifically under this initiative type when you can say we're going to create an initiative that's aimed at this cross-sell opportunity and then you can demonstrate that when users are fully educated in that initiative, they are more likely to agree to cross-sell or up-sell. Now you're driving revenue and, by the way, the end result of this is that, if I come back to the closed one opportunity, which, frankly, 30% was a bigger number than I expected.

Speaker 2:

I'm elated to see it, but it's a bigger number than I expected, Sure absolutely.

Speaker 1:

I'm elated to see it, but it's a bigger number than I expected. What that says to me is that there are teams right now that are pulling education forward in the sales cycle. They are intentionally building content and experiences to educate the prospect. If I say it a little differently, the ones that are ahead here are the ones that have established a definition for an education qualified lead.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

They are scaling EQLs now that they've got a definition for it. They are, interestingly, this requires even faster, more consistent iteration, and so they've sort of figured out this definition for EQL. They figured out, like, how it gets handed off and now they're testing, like the impact of how likely an educated EQL is to convert to SQO than a marketing qualifier.

Speaker 2:

That is another door.

Speaker 1:

But at the end of the day, the thing that makes me the most excited about that is that it takes our education leader and it now puts the education leader in a seat at the revenue acquisition table, as opposed to just being on the renewal side conversation. Yeah, like yeah I think that's the next frontier. It's super exciting that's interesting.

Speaker 2:

Um, a couple things that I I gleaned from from from. That was first and foremost, I think, the intentionality of it all, because going into this stuff with kind of like, oh, we're seeing this, seeing this, so let's just do this, and okay, great, we've done that Check, let's go on to the next thing. For early stage companies, that's probably what you have to do.

Speaker 1:

You know, just to like block and tackle and get her done. Yeah, that's your table stakes idea, exactly.

Speaker 2:

But if you really want to build like this stellar learning organization focused on customer retention, it's got to be like this intent, intention of okay, here's a problem that this leader has, here's a problem that this leader has, our CEO is focused on these things, the board is focused on these things, and here are the problems that are in the way to get us to those things. You identify those things and you say, okay, here's my hypotheses, as you were saying, like, we think that by educating XYZ cohort on this, we should be able to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You get some pre and post measurements in place and you go to town and I think that is such a great way of going about it, not just from a hey, let's measure our success perspective, but like, let's go in and measure our failures as well, like where do we, where do we not hit the mark and why didn't we hit the mark? And let's like, let's go back and see if we can hit the mark. I think that's super cool.

Speaker 2:

The other thing that I'm excited about those benchmarks that you were giving is because benchmarks like that are not easily found in CE. From my perspective, like, it's like kind of like okay, I we think this is going to happen or whatever. But if you can benchmark your own revenue generation closed, one, leads or whatever it is against a benchmark that exists, like the stuff that you're doing with Forrester, I think that's super powerful, because then it gives you a sense for how your program is performing in comparison to others in the industry.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, man. So one quick thing the Forrester data is really interesting because we did it in 2019 and now we've done it again in 2024. So there's not only like 2024 new fresh data that says like, hey, here's what you can achieve. There's also, if you really want to dig into it, like looking at the change in those numbers from 2019.

Speaker 2:

Pre and post pandemic.

Speaker 1:

Post pandemic. Yeah, all of that stuff is like it's really interesting to me. We could do a whole, there's a whole set.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's like caveat, the world fell apart between these two numbers.

Speaker 1:

Well and, frankly, maybe responsible for some of those numbers going up, but I think there's something like really also, I think it's lost as we start getting into these big numbers. It's like, yeah, I know, I know CE leaders that are like I. My assumption is that, like that's unlimited budget, some huge company I've got, I've got three people, I've got a really tight budget. The budget is shrinking and I want to dispel that a little bit. I don't think it requires anything significant to get to these numbers.

Speaker 1:

In fact, I think that even the largest, longest running initiatives, so huge companies that have like humongous catalogs, like the catalog size doesn't matter, the volume of content doesn't matter.

Speaker 1:

And I think even when we look at larger running, like huge catalogs, huge initiatives, lots of resources, they're still doing the same thing. Like we're still looking at the annual goal, we're creating an initiative that's going to address the goal, we're demonstrating impact on the goal because, like we have to do support, we all know that we have to do documentation, we all know that we're going to create curriculum, we're going to have courses, we're going to have certifications, we're going to have all of that's going to exist. I think what we have to be careful to do is look at the year, look at the company goals, identify which initiative types are going to get us there, double down on the content this year that's in that type, decide if it works, make quick changes. If it doesn't, test those changes all the time and then give the business a goal, give them the hypothesis we think we can make a 10% improvement on retention this year by launching a new onboarding course. We think better onboarded customers are more likely to renew at the end of their year.

Speaker 1:

Like. That's all it is. It doesn't matter how many customers.

Speaker 2:

And, by the way, like 10% retention increase in some businesses is a shit ton of money.

Speaker 1:

It's a shit ton of money. It's a shit ton of money and that's what like Forrester goes out and interviews, like whatever it is 500 customer education leaders from all over the place and the average number is that it's 25%. They're making a 25% impact on customer retention through education retention through education. And this brings up a whole other point, which is like, by the way, I want to give the shout out and the love to all my customer education professionals, because I think a good bit of this is like unsung hero stuff. I agree completely Like a lot of people are doing a lot of great work.

Speaker 1:

We just don't have the mechanics in place to measure and track it necessarily, and so I often wonder, like when we start working with new customers or people that are bringing programs over to the Intel and platform, it's like I don't know that the thought process here is always like let's go blow up what we have and start over with this rebuild that's going to get us to this customer retention improvement. I mean, I think what's actually more common or more needed is like we're not sure what the impact is that we're making today, and so let's get really like clear on how we're going to measure what we think works. And so there's, there's, there's strategies around. I mean, every company is different. My, my high level answer when people say, okay, I believe you, all this stuff sounds great, but you're not actually telling me what to do. So so I'm an education leader, I've got this environment. I can track and report on what I can track and report on generally learning outcomes. How do I get to the business?

Speaker 1:

Now, every company is going to be different and my, my short answer is go make some friends. You know, like there's, there's people like on the revenue upside that have the per customer spend now in every company. Are you going to get that per customer? No, they're going to tell you like that's against policy, which is totally fine because you know what your reaction is. Your reaction is like okay, cool, here's what I'm going to do. I know the customers because we have some customer identification. Like maybe it's a unique customer code that lives in LMS Salesforce ID or something like that.

Speaker 1:

Yes, so I've got this customer code. I have a list of learners who have completed content. I'm going to give you that list. I don't care what their individual spend is. What I want you to do, revops, is take this list of people and tell me, on average, did they spend more money? Are they, if we're working on cross sell upsell? Did these people spend more money after this date?

Speaker 1:

right and if the answer is yes, that's all you need to prove to the business. This group of people who are fully educated are more likely to spend more money. That's where budget and investment comes from yeah, that's so last thought, so huge none of this works right now.

Speaker 1:

None of it works unless the business is investing in education. Lots of businesses are going the other way, so I think it's going to be really hard to be like, hey, we made this massive increase on revenue If the business isn't investing in you making a huge increase in revenue. And so what I hope is that all that, all that Forrester data go get all that data, build your business case for why, right now, the business should be supporting you, and then you can go demonstrate that it works.

Speaker 2:

And that's where that relationship bit comes in so handy, because, having spent some time as a, as a CE leader myself, like it it can get very easy to just go into a silo, go into a bubble, do what you need to do, get the stuff out, get content cranking. But you got to spend as much time in the political and kind of relationship arena as you do kind of in the in the tactical arena, and I think that's that's also, quite frankly, where I think you have an edge, because you do have that marketing pedigree and you know what it takes to like change hearts and minds and convince people, and I think that's probably a massive consulting opportunity for y'all as well. As you go into new accounts. It's like, hey, let's set the stage for everybody.

Speaker 1:

One of the things when we prepped for this you'd ask me to think through, and I'll just drag us here right now as we let's do it. You'd ask me about mistakes and I think you're absolutely right, sidebar really quickly.

Speaker 1:

There is a growing trend of education moving to marketing, and so I don't think education folks that aren't marketers early in their career should fear that. I think it's actually that there's there's a lot of benefits. You asked me to do a couple of things. One was think about mistakes and one was think about people, and so I'll actually combine two of those. Somebody to take a look at. There's a guy named Andrew DeBell at Atlassian. So full disclosure, andrew at Atlassian are clients. Andrew has a great talk track that he did at Sedma about why rolling over into marketing has been a great thing for them, and it was. I watched him do this presentation. It was really insightful, really eye-opening. I'm hoping that Sedma's got it up on the site.

Speaker 2:

If not, we'll try to If it is, I'll link it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, if not, we'll strong arm Andrew into doing it again someplace where we can all watch it. But it was really great and he just sort of talked about what all the benefit is. But as an example, the thing we're talking about, like this struggle to. You can have the plan to get to the ROI, but you have to get somebody to either give you the correlating data that shows the impact or you've got to. You know, you've either got to get it yourself or you got to get them to do the thing, like I said, where you just sort of say, okay, fine, just tell me on average how many, what the impact is here. One of the things he talked about was like man. The truth is, we were over here and it was really hard for us to get data. And then we moved over here and all of a sudden we have access to all the things. We have access to all the data. We can get all the data and the relationships are already there. So I think the market people worry about where CE is going to go and I don't know that it matters. When you see things like education go to market, it can be a huge benefit.

Speaker 1:

The marketing thing, I think is important. One mistake that I have made, and then I think other educators have made, is not thinking about marketing, like not wanting to think about marketing, and I think education wants to be something. That's not marketing. I think there's a lot of education people, myself included, who will stand up and say education and marketing are very different things. Marketing has no place in your education environment. The way you convince somebody to do something from a sales and marketing perspective is very different from the way you teach somebody to do it. When you put marketing materials into your education environment, you're diluting blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1:

I think all of that's still true. I think the thing we missed, though, is that education, especially customer education, is still a reach and frequency game, and the basic tenant of marketing is reach and frequency. How many people are we getting in front of, and how often are we getting in front of them? And so I think there are lessons we can learn from our friends in marketing about how to constantly promote the existence of this education environment that literally no learner or user has to do anything in. They don't have to do anything, and so, all the time, even big companies I'll see them launch something and be like hooray, we launched this awesome customer education environment and then never think through what they're proactively doing to drag those people back into the education environment consistently.

Speaker 1:

So I think that's that's that's could be, a huge mistake.

Speaker 2:

If you build it, they will come is a very rare thing. Like one, maybe one time. Like like open AI, of course you build it, they came. But like hey, we launched this thing, great, okay, cool.

Speaker 2:

But I mean to your point though, like, if you, if you think of the venn diagram of customer education and marketing, yes, there's different things, there's different intention, different audience. You're going to do learning objectives and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and all that kind of stuff over here, whereas here you're going to focus on your cts and where the, but the overlap, when you think about the reach, when you think about the branding, when you think about like the, just the, the voice and the, the, the data and the connections, and the blah, blah, blah. Like the, the overlap is just as much as the, the, the differences, I think. So that's a um, so that's a super brilliant point to start to close out our conversation, which I'm crazy sad about because I've really enjoyed it, which is obvious, because we're way over time and I hope I'm not making you late for your next meeting.

Speaker 2:

This is important. Ask you a little bit about, like A, what's in your content, diet, like, what are you paying attention to? What's the stuff that you read on a daily basis um well, so I read a lot of comic books.

Speaker 1:

That's super important. Big batman fan cool, awesome, yeah, yeah, that's. That's daily diet stuff. It always has been.

Speaker 2:

You can learn a lot from bruce wing actually not not just not just that having unlimited funds is the ultimate super yeah, I don't, yeah, we don't need to know where that money comes from.

Speaker 1:

No, we don't Totally. That's always the case, but be prepared for every eventuality is actually the lesson. I think that's a good one. I have a nine-year-old daughter. We watch a lot of kids shows, so, taking those things out of it, there's this digital customer success podcast that I listen to a lot, and this guy, alex, is pretty great, so I highly recommend that people pay attention.

Speaker 1:

You probably do know him, but my boy, jay Nathan, has always created great content and it's evolved over time. He's got two newsletters that happen every week. As an example that I consume every week, one's called Growth Curve and the other one is called the Middle.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's right. He's on two episodes ago.

Speaker 1:

Oh great, yeah, so well, further proof that you should be listening to the digital success. So I think that from a sort of like real-time content perspective, those are two go-tos for me. I think there's folks to follow. Andrew DeBell on LinkedIn says a lot of really interesting stuff and I think he's worth looking at. There's a great sidebar story there about it that we didn't get to, but about Atlassian and YouTube specifically, they have embraced this massive community of people creating how-to videos about Atlassian tools that Atlassian historically didn't have any sort of like relationship with or interaction with, and so they've been incredibly smart about how they have created a bi-directional content creation relationship Really cool.

Speaker 1:

He talks a lot about stuff. He's really great.

Speaker 2:

User-generated content.

Speaker 1:

Oh yeah, man, that whole story is really interesting and kudos to Lasting, because I think they're doing it exactly right. They've embraced it and really, really done a great job supporting the community there. Dee Capilla is doing some really cool stuff, so if you don't know her, she's at Miro. I think a lot of the things that she talks about resonate with me when I'm looking at her post and her content. The difference between us is that, like I have like 200 like SaaS tech clients, like in Google or at Meta or Atlassian or amazon or whatever, she's got like 60 million customers. So like the scale is mind-blowing to me and she does. I mean she just she talks about really like, really cool stuff. I think those are, those are great yeah, good, call on d she.

Speaker 2:

I'm just looking back. I think she was kind of early on one of my guests, but she she's a local Austinite and fun, not fun funny stories. I used to work with her husband, which is kind of cool, but yeah, so it's just kind of a small Austin world. Yeah, she was episode 38, not too long ago. But what she does and she doesn't talk about it enough does and she doesn't talk about it enough. Like it's, she's the model for cx period, I think modern cx.

Speaker 1:

For sure, that's awesome. My book stack is enormous. I mean I don't know that I'm ever gonna get through all the books right there's. There's so many. I was thinking about pulling them all over and going through them one at a time, but I don't think you might.

Speaker 2:

You got to send me it.

Speaker 1:

That's not a lie. I'll do two, so hold on so quickly. Two that I'm really excited about reading. I'm late on this one, but Leadership Revolution.

Speaker 1:

Oh, cool, okay, I think it's going to be really great. There's a really cool company called Sounding Board and Laurie Mazan is one of their founders. They do like executive leadership, coaching, and just have amassed a lot of information and I highly respect both of them and I think this is going to be. I think this book should be great. I've never read it, but I'm about to it's. The Creative Act is the name of the book by Rick Rubin. About to. It's the. The creative act is the name of the book by rick rubin. It's so good. Yeah, if you're so good. Yeah, I've always it's always been on the list. I've never done it. I'm finally.

Speaker 2:

I'm like all right, I'm going in my recommendation would actually be to go to audible and listen to him him talk about yeah, yeah yeah, it's so good, that's a good one, that's awesome. Well, well, cool man. I appreciate all those resources links outs, all that kind of stuff. We'll put it in the show notes for everybody to digest. And, most importantly, I appreciate your time and your knowledge and your insights and your crazy smart mouth words.

Speaker 1:

I'm honored to be on the podcast. There's so many important people that have been on here. Just the chance to have my name in the list is an honor, so yeah, no worries, you belong right among them, so thanks for the time. Thanks, man, I appreciate it. Bye everybody.

Speaker 2:

Thank you for joining me for this episode of the Digital CX Podcast. If you like what we're doing, consider leaving us a review on your podcast platform of choice. If you're watching on YouTube, leave a comment down below. It really helps us to grow and provide value to a broader audience. You can view the Digital Customer Success Definition Wordmap and get more information about the show and some of the other things that we're doing at digitalcustomersuccesscom.

Speaker 2:

This episode was edited by Lifetime Value Media, a media production company founded by our good mutual friend, dylan Young. Lifetime Value aims to serve the content video audio production needs of the CS and post-sale community. They're offering services at a steep discount for a limited time. So navigate to lifetimevaluemediacom, go have a chat with Dylan and make sure you mention the Digital CX podcast sent you. I'm Alex Trukovich. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you next week.

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