Brian Childs' customer education maturity model

[00:00:00] The Importance of Customer Education

[00:00:00] Ramli John: Customer education is such a potent marketing powerup, it can lead to increased product usage, higher customer satisfaction, and stronger brand loyalty.
[00:00:08] Ramli John: Now, Brian Childs, founder of Learning Outcomes.
[00:00:10] Ramli John: He has worked with companies like Moss Toilet industries and more.
[00:00:14] Ramli John: Today, he shares his customer training program Scorecard.
[00:00:16] Ramli John: In episode 62 of the marketing Power up show, you learn, first of all, why customer education is so important.
[00:00:21] Ramli John: Second, at which stage should companies care about customer education?
[00:00:24] Ramli John: Shirt, how to measure the Roi of customer education programs.
[00:00:28] Ramli John: And number four, a powerp that has accelerated Brian's career.
[00:00:31] Ramli John: Before we get started, I created a free powerup cheat sheet that you can download and apply Brian's customer training program scorecard to your business.
[00:00:38] Ramli John: Get it now@marketingparups.com.
[00:00:39] Ramli John: Or find the link in the show notes and description.

[00:00:42] Training programs and customer education are important for success

[00:00:42] Ramli John: You ready?
[00:00:43] Ramli John: Let's go.
[00:00:44] Brian Childs: Marketing power ups, ready, go.
[00:00:51] Brian Childs: Here's your host, Rambly John.
[00:00:55] Ramli John: So excited to have you come on the show.
[00:00:58] Ramli John: Talk about training programs and customer education.
[00:01:02] Ramli John: It's been a big part of my career.
[00:01:03] Ramli John: I've been in the training space for some time.
[00:01:07] Ramli John: But for people who are not familiar with it, you built your career around this, and now you have this company, learning outcomes, which is built around this topic.
[00:01:18] Ramli John: Why is it so important to you like this customer education and training?
[00:01:23] Ramli John: You probably have seen it in your work, and you've probably seen it in the companies and clients that you work with.
[00:01:29] Ramli John: Why customer education is so important?
[00:01:32] Brian Childs: Yeah, well, I've had a lot of different roles in my life.
[00:01:38] Brian Childs: I've always enjoyed teaching.
[00:01:40] Brian Childs: So I'd say that one of the things for whatever, I don't know if you could measure it, but it's like the people who tend to end up in this space, like sharing information with other people.
[00:01:50] Brian Childs: And so that's just a quality that tends to exist with folks that are here.
[00:01:54] Brian Childs: But I think for me, it's like, way back in the day, I used to be a commercial pilot and worked in aviation for about ten years.
[00:02:02] Brian Childs: And it was interesting to leave aviation and go into enterprise software and b to b businesses.
[00:02:11] Brian Childs: And it's like, in aviation, it's like we would train towards a very specific metric, which was like safety.
[00:02:18] Brian Childs: And so you'd literally have these stats down to multiple decimal points in terms of how to impact, positively impact safety.
[00:02:27] Brian Childs: And when I got into more business functions, it was as if to take the equivalency of saying, we want to reduce crashes in planes, but every time a customer churns, we're sort of like, that's like a plane just hitting a mountain, but we're not looking at it at all.
[00:02:45] Brian Childs: There was this question of, like, I'm also kind of an operations person.
[00:02:50] Brian Childs: I think people in customer education roles or training roles also tend to be somewhat operationally minded, is you'd be like, what are the things that are contributing to these negative outcomes?
[00:03:01] Brian Childs: Like, how can we root cause analysis, provide a root cause analysis of that and figuring it out?
[00:03:06] Brian Childs: And so I think that aspect of trying to correlate what causes these negative aspects in businesses is just kind of generally interesting to me.
[00:03:18] Brian Childs: And then there's also this kind of people aspect to it, which is education.
[00:03:24] Brian Childs: And training is about changing human behavior.
[00:03:27] Brian Childs: And so it's like, I have an undergrad in anthropology, and so even way back then, it's like I kind of was drawn to trying to understand how human behaviors can be impacted, why people do things that they do.
[00:03:39] Brian Childs: And so education is kind of like this marrying up of an operations problem.
[00:03:43] Brian Childs: So you're like, I got to figure out how I can drive this percent change on the back end of some activity, along with the percent changes that you're trying to impact are people's behaviors.
[00:03:54] Brian Childs: And so training is a way that you can materially transform someone's trajectory through whatever it is that they're going to do.
[00:04:04] Brian Childs: It can be in software.
[00:04:05] Brian Childs: It could be literally in anything.
[00:04:07] Brian Childs: It's like people learning to drive a car.
[00:04:09] Brian Childs: If you just drop somebody in a car and go knock yourself out, it's like accident rates quite high.
[00:04:15] Brian Childs: It's like, we train people on it because you're like, well, we got to have some expectation of that you're able to control this thing.
[00:04:21] Brian Childs: And that same concept can be applied to just about any business, any business problem.
[00:04:28] Brian Childs: The training wrench can be applied in some way that tends to lead to more positive outcomes.
[00:04:33] Brian Childs: And so I'm attracted to that because it's like, I like producing business value and business strategy and operations and all that.
[00:04:43] Brian Childs: There's a lot of components that go into it.
[00:04:45] Ramli John: What I'm hearing is that the big part of it, I love the analogy with a car or even with a plane.
[00:04:52] Ramli John: You're not going to drop somebody in a plane and be like, fly 200 folks to Hawaii without giving them the training.
[00:05:00] Ramli John: And I feel like sometimes that's what we do with our customers.
[00:05:03] Ramli John: We're like, for sure, here's the tool.
[00:05:05] Ramli John: Go figure it out.
[00:05:07] Ramli John: Here's some product tours.
[00:05:08] Ramli John: And I think that's without any thought around it, those kind of approaches set them up for failure.
[00:05:18] Brian Childs: Really.
[00:05:18] Ramli John: You're talking about, how do you set up customers for success?
[00:05:22] Ramli John: Essentially and make sure that they figure out how to use a tool.
[00:05:26] Ramli John: And not just that, but how do we do their jobs better?
[00:05:30] Ramli John: What they do.
[00:05:31] Brian Childs: Yeah, and I think the parallels, I mean, this is not a foreign concept to people who have backgrounds in marketing because you could look at the, if you think about sort of like a customer lifecycle analysis where you'd say we're going to have awareness campaigns and then comparison campaigns and conversion activities, it's like training activities are either run parallel to those or are part of those.
[00:05:54] Brian Childs: It's like you're educating people on your brand.
[00:05:56] Brian Childs: You're educating people on the value that that brand produces and whatnot.
[00:06:00] Brian Childs: And just like a marketing campaign, it can be done poorly really easily.
[00:06:07] Brian Childs: But just like a marketing campaign, what you're trying to do is you're trying to eliminate and streamline the flow of people towards the value that you like, if know, launching an email campaign and I want to send them to a landing page and I want the CTA to take them to the know.
[00:06:28] Brian Childs: It's like all along that path you have little measurements that you can look at that say like page views versus conversion rates versus button clicks or whatever, and it's really no different in training.
[00:06:40] Brian Childs: You're still just trying to streamline and eliminate any kind of blockage within that flow.
[00:06:46] Brian Childs: It's just the main value metric that you be measuring against is further down the path than purely just like a sale.
[00:06:57] Brian Childs: Like you would look at it as be like I'm going to take that main metric that I want, which is like maybe sales qualified leads and I'm just going to move that further down the customer lifecycle and say, actually I'm going to do all those same things, but then I'm going to actually measure against the adoption rate of the customers that come through.
[00:07:13] Brian Childs: And so all it's doing is moving your main metric further down the path and yet you can still retain all of those same sort of interstitial measurements along the way.
[00:07:25] Brian Childs: So it marries very closely to the way that marketing is because marketing is still, you're still trying to impact people's behaviors to go towards the value that you're producing and follow that.

[00:07:37] Proving ROI for Training Initiatives in SaaS

[00:07:37] Ramli John: I love how you keep this is like the third or fourth time you mentioned how this is really about changing behaviors and really that's what this is about.
[00:07:46] Ramli John: People are not just adopting a product, they actually have to change their behavior around it, especially if it's maybe a new product and they're moving away from spreadsheets or like nothing sometimes no tool at all where there is a new habit they have to form, essentially, and training can really help with that.
[00:08:09] Ramli John: You mentioned around the impact to it is around reducing churn.
[00:08:15] Ramli John: Have you seen any ranges of how.
[00:08:19] Ramli John: Yeah, I guess I'm trying to get at is how do you prove ROI around this and show that there's impact in when you're creating these programs to leadership specifically?
[00:08:34] Brian Childs: Yeah.
[00:08:35] Brian Childs: So I would say that there's a couple of different ways of looking at the ROI question, and I think it depends on where the program is originating.
[00:08:46] Brian Childs: So if it's originating or it's sort of like if you're looking for the ROI through the lens of maybe marketing, there's a couple of ways of looking at it.
[00:08:55] Brian Childs: There's also ways of looking at it through the lens of customer success.
[00:08:59] Brian Childs: And so when it comes to marketing folks or marketing minded folks, I would look at training activities as no different than a product.
[00:09:08] Brian Childs: So it's like it's a product or a feature.
[00:09:10] Brian Childs: When you're launching a training initiative, you are launching a product or a service, right.
[00:09:16] Brian Childs: And so they have a lot of the same qualities as a product you have to focus on.
[00:09:21] Brian Childs: Are people going to be aware of this?
[00:09:22] Brian Childs: Are they going to adopt it?
[00:09:24] Brian Childs: Are they going to engage in it?
[00:09:26] Brian Childs: Are they going to continue and repeat and drive repeat usage within it has all those same qualities within it.
[00:09:32] Brian Childs: And so it helps to look at it through that lens.
[00:09:37] Brian Childs: And so then when you think about the ROI, what you could be looking at then is an uptick in the customer lifetime value.
[00:09:47] Brian Childs: Right.
[00:09:48] Brian Childs: And so customer lifetime value, it can be sort of a conceptual idea or you could just tie it to dollars or money, whatever.
[00:09:58] Brian Childs: And so it's best if you can tie it to money and say, like, look, we are going to launch a training initiative or I'm going to take on the marketing of a training initiative and we're going to try to drive an increase in customer lifetime value.
[00:10:15] Brian Childs: So things that make that a little bit easier are you could look at it two ways.
[00:10:23] Brian Childs: One is either I'm going to increase the size of, increase the number of people that I'm pushing into my campaigns or pushing into my sales qualified lead funnel.
[00:10:38] Brian Childs: That's one way of increasing it is it's purely like I'm going to increase the number of people that are going into it and so therefore I can have an increase in revenue.
[00:10:47] Brian Childs: If you want to use a pure customer lifetime value for an individual account, then what you'd say is it's the number of people who are maybe interacting with this training, but I would look at it with those kinds of ROI metrics through for the lens of a marketing person is like customer lifetime value is really what you're trying to impact.
[00:11:07] Brian Childs: Some ways to do that that are sort of like the easy ways to do that is charge for training, right?
[00:11:12] Brian Childs: Have it be something that's like a professional service or tie a dollar amount to it.
[00:11:17] Brian Childs: That is particularly impactful for b to c companies that have a monthly SaaS business model.
[00:11:28] Brian Childs: Because oftentimes with b to c companies that have monthly SaaS or some kind of free trial or whatever, you see fairly horrific drop offs after your first month.
[00:11:38] Brian Childs: Month, zero to month one drop off is like a huge problem, right?
[00:11:42] Brian Childs: Or even if you look at the first three months of a typical account, you would say like, you see pretty significant drop off rates in those first three months.
[00:11:50] Brian Childs: And so training becomes a good upsell opportunity for people that are trying to learn a product.
[00:11:57] Brian Childs: So when I'm comparing a couple of different products, if I'm selling training, this is a way to sort of attach a feature to them that's a paid feature where you could say like, yeah, we charge back in the day, whatever, 1999 a month maybe, it's probably like $79 a month now, but if we can add an additional $299 in a training program to that or 499 or something where it's just like, look, there's a boot camp, and attach that to those accounts, you will see a dramatic increase in the value of a place that typically is like a low value segment, which is like all those people that drop off the first three months.
[00:12:32] Brian Childs: It's like, what if you could increase them from being a $79 account or lifetime value to like a 579?
[00:12:40] Brian Childs: And so, training is a great way to do that.
[00:12:44] Brian Childs: If you think about it as a product, I'd say that on the success operations, the customer lifetime value question becomes a little bit more of a retention challenge.
[00:12:57] Brian Childs: So that's not necessarily tends to be a marketing problem.
[00:13:01] Brian Childs: But if you can think about this value also in terms of increasing customer lifetime value over a much longer period of time, and that becomes more of like a retention play.
[00:13:09] Brian Childs: And those retention plays would say that deeper adoption of your product will result in the actualization or realization of more value from what you provide.
[00:13:20] Brian Childs: And so a higher likely stickiness rate.
[00:13:24] Brian Childs: Because what often happens with most people don't like to admit this, but with a lot of SaaS businesses, the majority of accounts will only use a very small number of the features that you have.
[00:13:35] Brian Childs: And so if you can get greater penetration, then you unlock all that value of all that product that you've invested in building.
[00:13:42] Brian Childs: So there's a couple of different ways to look at it, but I generally look at the ROI as being like a customer lifetime value increase, whether or not that's through sales or through retained revenue.

[00:13:51] The Importance of Training Programs and Brand Positioning

[00:13:51] Ramli John: I really like the lenses that you put there where the marketing side, I guess that was one of the side questions I had for you around whether you should charge for it or not, and you kind of answered it there.
[00:14:05] Ramli John: Do you have any guidelines around that?
[00:14:07] Ramli John: Where I see some companies that do charge for it, let's say Salesforce, they charge for their training versus something like, I'm not sure, something smaller like pipe.
[00:14:21] Ramli John: I forgot that company that's smaller, but they don't charge for their training.
[00:14:27] Ramli John: It might depend on segment, but do you have any advice for people specifically if they come to you and ask you, hey, Brian, should we charge for our training program or $500 or like $30 or not?
[00:14:39] Brian Childs: What would be your advice to them?
[00:14:41] Brian Childs: Yeah, my advice, it's pretty simple advice.
[00:14:44] Brian Childs: My advice is that if you're training about your product, then it's probably free.
[00:14:50] Brian Childs: If you're training about how to do the job related to your product, now you have a capacity development on the team, and that's of extreme value.
[00:15:00] Brian Childs: And maybe an analogy would be like, you buy a car with every car or a lawnmower or whatever.
[00:15:09] Brian Childs: It's like when you buy something, there's this little book that comes along with it that's like, here's how to put the oil in, and here's what the lights mean or whatever, right?
[00:15:16] Brian Childs: That comes with the car.
[00:15:18] Brian Childs: If they're charging you for it, go to a different dealership.
[00:15:23] Brian Childs: But nonetheless, it's like when you get that little manual that goes along with the thing that you've purchased, that's free, and the expectation in the market is that's free.
[00:15:30] Brian Childs: It's like, you shouldn't charge me to use your tool.
[00:15:33] Brian Childs: For some enterprise platforms, there's a professional service that goes along with it, which people expect.
[00:15:38] Brian Childs: But for the most part, that's like professional service.
[00:15:42] Brian Childs: Not necessarily like a training program.
[00:15:44] Brian Childs: It's more like an onboarding expectation.
[00:15:46] Brian Childs: Right.
[00:15:47] Brian Childs: If you're going to go move into helping that person do their job better, regardless of what tool they're using, if it's your tool, if it's your competitor's tool, whatever concepts I'll use.
[00:16:00] Brian Childs: An and I worked for Moz.
[00:16:02] Brian Childs: It was a search engine optimization software.
[00:16:05] Brian Childs: I used to run boot camps on how to do search engine optimization.
[00:16:09] Brian Childs: We would sprinkle in Moz into this because obviously that was a tool that we had access to.
[00:16:14] Brian Childs: I mean, I had admin access to this thing, so it's like, I would do it, but the concepts that were there were more like, how to do this effectively.
[00:16:20] Brian Childs: Regardless of what tool you use.
[00:16:22] Brian Childs: If you get into that stuff, you are building a capability on your customers team and you're sort of starting to move into places where the university and education systems have failed, where you're like, if you can't find this information elsewhere, we as a brand are going to do it.
[00:16:48] Brian Childs: And it's really powerful.
[00:16:49] Brian Childs: It's a place where brands can move in and say, like, not only do we build this, but we really know this stuff.
[00:16:56] Brian Childs: And that's the distinction that I make.
[00:17:00] Brian Childs: You're talking about your product for b to c, it's probably free.
[00:17:04] Brian Childs: If you're talking about how to do the job and do your job better and the best practices, now you got the rudiments of a paid training program.
[00:17:16] Brian Childs: The payment increases the value, the perceived value too.
[00:17:19] Brian Childs: That's the other thing too, is like, sometimes people will be like, oh, I don't want to charge that much.
[00:17:23] Brian Childs: I'm like, charge for it.
[00:17:25] Brian Childs: See what people will pay.
[00:17:26] Brian Childs: Because the willingness to pay for that kind of information can be quite high.
[00:17:30] Ramli John: That really gets more into career development or like skill development where they have certain budget.
[00:17:37] Ramli John: Most people in working in companies have a certain budget for training, and this helps them do their job better, or especially with certification programs as well.
[00:17:46] Ramli John: It makes them look more hireable per se.
[00:17:50] Ramli John: If they're looking to go to another workplace where I'm not sure if there's Moss certified, but it was or SEO certified by Moss.
[00:17:59] Ramli John: That looks good to them.
[00:18:01] Brian Childs: Yeah, badging programs are huge.
[00:18:05] Brian Childs: Skills based training is going to continue to increase.
[00:18:09] Brian Childs: I mean, I just heard some metric that 50% of families right now don't know whether or not the value of a higher education is worth it.
[00:18:21] Brian Childs: So compare that to ten years ago, where like 95 or 99% of people thought that higher education was an essential thing.
[00:18:30] Brian Childs: It's like that edifice in our society is degrading and it's degrading quickly.
[00:18:36] Brian Childs: People still need to develop skills, they still need to build a constellation of capabilities of them and help them within the job market.
[00:18:47] Brian Childs: But the idea that the higher education system is going to be the place where you go for that is dramatically changing.
[00:18:54] Brian Childs: And I think brands have a huge opportunity to step into that and say, like, we can capitalize on that value we can create the infrastructure around that knowledge and be the place to know about it for most activities that we are involved in.
[00:19:14] Brian Childs: Right.
[00:19:15] Brian Childs: Like anything that we do, there's usually only a couple of really good ways to do it.
[00:19:20] Brian Childs: And if you can just be like, we're just going to document it and create the training for it and teach exactly how to do it, you can put your brand right in the middle of that conversation and sort of capitalize on that.
[00:19:30] Brian Childs: I think that that's slowly happening, but I would expect that over the course of the next couple of years, it's going to accelerate as people get into more skills based training and wake up to the realities of what a badging and skills based badging system can do.
[00:19:42] Ramli John: What I'm seeing also as an added benefit to that is the whole brand perspective where because Moss trained me on this, now I feel good about Moss.
[00:19:52] Brian Childs: For sure, so to speak.
[00:19:53] Ramli John: They've helped me get the next job that I have.
[00:19:56] Ramli John: Where I'm more likely to bring moss to my next job is such an important play.
[00:20:01] Ramli John: We've seen this with HubSpot, with HubSpot Academy, where they really make them, people feel good about them because they have free training program, but it's just built this relationship with people that they feel good about the brand and they use it because of that, essentially, yeah.
[00:20:21] Brian Childs: I mean, there is a thing that I'll often repeat, which is people only learn something the first time once.
[00:20:32] Brian Childs: So think about that.
[00:20:34] Brian Childs: You only learn something the first time once.
[00:20:38] Brian Childs: And if you're the brand that is the one that teaches you the first time.
[00:20:45] Brian Childs: That's a special place that you hold with them.
[00:20:50] Brian Childs: And it's interesting because we're talking about training, right?
[00:20:55] Brian Childs: We're kind of like talking about what training programs can do.
[00:20:58] Brian Childs: But think about how important brand positioning is and how difficult it is to build a brand that is noticeable.
[00:21:07] Brian Childs: Training for marketers should be a place that they look to to establish that brand positioning.
[00:21:15] Brian Childs: It's relatively easy, right?
[00:21:17] Brian Childs: You could be like, oh, we're going to be the apple of whatever.
[00:21:20] Brian Childs: And it's like, that's really hard.
[00:21:23] Brian Childs: That's a hard thing to break out with because you can say it, you can tell me all day long.
[00:21:27] Brian Childs: You're like, yeah, we're the apple of whatever.
[00:21:28] Brian Childs: And I'm like, maybe, but if you're the place where I go to learn about it now we have a special relationship.
[00:21:36] Brian Childs: We have a special reason.
[00:21:38] Brian Childs: Right?
[00:21:38] Brian Childs: If you think about lower down on the sales funnel now I have a very special reason to come back to you and see how that training impacted your life.
[00:21:48] Brian Childs: Think about a BDR that's been trained or an SDR that's been trained to go and be like, so how did that go?
[00:21:54] Brian Childs: It's been a couple of weeks since you've done that.
[00:21:55] Brian Childs: Anything going on, you can create your funnel around that brand positioning around training.
[00:22:01] Brian Childs: And instead of it being a cold email or a cold call, being like, hey, can I buy an Amazon card or whatever, no one likes that.
[00:22:09] Brian Childs: But if it's all of a sudden like a consultative approach where we gave you some tools, are you using them?
[00:22:16] Brian Childs: You're deep into the sale all of a sudden.

[00:22:19] Using Training as a Sales Qualification Tool

[00:22:19] Brian Childs: And I'll add another thing to this as well for marketers to consider is go to your sales organization, go to your demand gen team, your sales ops team, and ask them what are the hard things to do in qualification.
[00:22:34] Brian Childs: So you got these BDRs that are out there who have a marketing qualified lead and they got to get on the phone or send an email and they got to go dig into a couple of specific pieces of information to turn them into an SQL training.
[00:22:48] Brian Childs: Because you end up talking about things in such an open way.
[00:22:52] Brian Childs: If you structure it in a way where you're asking people questions about their organizations or about their roles, you can collect pieces of information that are those hard to gather, SQL, bant, whatever you bant, or medic, whatever your qualification criteria is, you can ask somebody in a training organization, well, what kind of budget are you working with?
[00:23:12] Brian Childs: And it's not going to come off as sounding like a sales pitch, but if you can do that in a way that captures it in structured data, you can attach that to their account.
[00:23:21] Brian Childs: So training is also, not only is it a brand position, it's a huge opportunity to collect sales qualified lead criteria so you can move people quickly down the funnel and apply your sales resources in a much more sophisticated way.
[00:23:35] Ramli John: That is just blowing my mind.
[00:23:37] Ramli John: I don't see a lot of organizations doing.
[00:23:39] Ramli John: Have you seen any companies do that well where they've really integrated a training program into their sales process or qualification process?
[00:23:49] Brian Childs: It's new.
[00:23:50] Brian Childs: I'll say that when I talk about this to companies, they're like, oh my God, right.
[00:23:59] Brian Childs: But I'll often show them examples that are not training examples where they can see where it's like, this is a thing that we're actually pretty familiar with.
[00:24:09] Brian Childs: It's just not a thing that people really pull on from a training standpoint.
[00:24:12] Brian Childs: Because again, the challenge with a sales qualified lead conversation is that no one likes to be sold to and our phones won't even let BDRs call me anymore.
[00:24:20] Brian Childs: They'll be like spam.
[00:24:21] Brian Childs: And I'm like, goodbye, rocket.
[00:24:23] Brian Childs: Yeah.
[00:24:25] Brian Childs: But I'll give you a non training example where this is the case, okay?
[00:24:31] Brian Childs: So when I go to Zillow or Redfin or something like that, it's like, and I'm going to plug in information about my mortgage calculator or whatever, these kinds of calculators that are out there where people are plugging in information that's going to help me determine what I can do or whatever.
[00:24:51] Brian Childs: If you're like, I don't know, say like a DevOps software, right?
[00:24:57] Brian Childs: And you're like, well, fill this out and provide some information in this training environment, or we're going to do an exercise, we're going to look at blah, blah, blah, and you're going to put some information about maybe the size of your network or the needs that you have around security issues.
[00:25:14] Brian Childs: Go and look at anytime you've ever filled out a calculator that's associated with whatever thing you're interested in.
[00:25:22] Brian Childs: And imagine what if you could have that data in, hand that data over to your sales organization or that they have a sales organization that's sort of like this guy put in.
[00:25:30] Brian Childs: He wants to buy a house that's like 200,000 versus 2 million.
[00:25:33] Brian Childs: There's a big difference between that person.
[00:25:34] Brian Childs: They willing to put the AE on the person that has like the $2 million budget, not the $200,000 budget.
[00:25:40] Brian Childs: So it's still pretty new.
[00:25:42] Brian Childs: But realize that this is a thing that you can do with training.
[00:25:47] Brian Childs: It's a very special relationship.
[00:25:49] Brian Childs: It's a low barrier relationship.
[00:25:50] Brian Childs: And people like to share in that training experience where if you can tie that into your account record in Salesforce, really amazing things happen.
[00:26:00] Brian Childs: It takes a lot of coordination with.

[00:26:01] Patterns in Sales Training Program Challenges

[00:26:01] Ramli John: Your sales.org, though, actually, funny, I'm actually going to bring up your updated training program scorecard.
[00:26:09] Ramli John: So it grades programs based on four dimensions, structure, integration, resourcing and process.
[00:26:16] Ramli John: One of the questions I remember was, does your program integrate with your CRM?
[00:26:22] Ramli John: And it's like, okay, this is all kind of connecting together essentially.
[00:26:26] Ramli John: But you've relaunched this core card.
[00:26:29] Ramli John: It's updated.
[00:26:31] Ramli John: I'm curious, you must start seeing patterns in terms of the data.
[00:26:36] Ramli John: Are there any specific pattern in terms of where programs need help the most or any other interesting patterns you've seen based on conversations or the data that you're getting through the scorecard?
[00:26:50] Brian Childs: Yeah.
[00:26:50] Brian Childs: So the scorecard that you're talking about is we've relaunched this thing on learning outcomes, which is an opportunity for program leaders to get an assessment of their program.
[00:27:06] Brian Childs: And like you say, we measure on four different dimensions and then it creates a little report, gives you a score across these four different dimensions.
[00:27:15] Brian Childs: And that report, what people are doing or what they're telling me they're doing is they're taking that report and then going.
[00:27:19] Brian Childs: And that's a good way to sort of start a conversation with your executive sponsors and be like, look, these are the areas we need to really focus on.
[00:27:26] Brian Childs: So I'll take you behind the scenes on what's going on with the scorecard a little bit.
[00:27:31] Brian Childs: The scorecard is measuring two different main dimensions, okay?
[00:27:37] Brian Childs: Those two different dimensions are the person who's filling it out and the organization that they're in.
[00:27:43] Brian Childs: And I'll use an analogy to say that if you go try to plant an apple tree in concrete, you're not going to really get a lot of apples out of it, right?
[00:27:55] Brian Childs: So it's like you could have a sophisticated, viable program leader, but your organization might not be set up to make or capitalize on that person's capabilities.
[00:28:08] Brian Childs: And so this scorecard really measures these two different things.
[00:28:11] Brian Childs: One is there's a lot of questions in there that about you.
[00:28:13] Brian Childs: So it's like, do you do this?
[00:28:15] Brian Childs: What are the capabilities you bring to the table?
[00:28:18] Brian Childs: And there's a lot of stuff that talks about how siloed is your organization?
[00:28:23] Brian Childs: Do people share backlogs, these things that are relevant to the organization?
[00:28:28] Brian Childs: And so what the interesting aspect of the data that's coming out of it.
[00:28:32] Brian Childs: And maybe this is no surprise, but it's like the people who are taking it, more often than not, are scoring relatively high on the things that they themselves are in control of.
[00:28:43] Brian Childs: So maybe you've worked in these roles before, maybe you've done these kinds of activities before.
[00:28:48] Brian Childs: Maybe you have a good sense of process and you know the language of how to do all of this, you can execute it if given the opportunity.
[00:28:55] Brian Childs: The biggest challenges are faced at the organizational level.
[00:28:59] Brian Childs: Siloing, a lack of shared backlogs, a lack of cross functional engagement, those kinds of things.
[00:29:06] Brian Childs: So it's like, even if I was to give you all the power in the world and the biggest budget in the world possible, the organization that you're working in is not ready to capitalize on the opportunity of customer education.
[00:29:19] Brian Childs: And I would argue that the same kinds of things, the similar types of questions could be said about sophisticated marketing campaigns where it's like you might be a really great marketer, but the organization that you're planted in is not really capable of doing, of executing what is required, which is like a cross functional engagement with a customer that follows them down the lifecycle and keeps the value story consistent throughout the whole thing all the way to the point where they buy and adopt your solution.
[00:29:51] Ramli John: Yeah, I've seen that time and time again.
[00:29:53] Ramli John: It seems like it's more organizational, political issue or more like a data issue or maybe both, where systems are not talking to each other and the organization hasn't, I guess, set all the pipeline and all the process in place so that they can take advantage of the program, the training program more across the.

[00:30:15] The intersections between customer education and data silos

[00:30:15] Brian Childs: Yeah, I think you're touching on the two.
[00:30:18] Brian Childs: So there's three dimensions.
[00:30:20] Brian Childs: So I'm mentioning one is like the person and the other is the organization.
[00:30:23] Brian Childs: I would break the organization into two aspects and you can think of this as a two x two matrix.
[00:30:27] Brian Childs: So if your audience wants to visualize this, the two x two is.
[00:30:32] Brian Childs: I do love a two x two.
[00:30:34] Brian Childs: The two x two is on one side would be data architecture.
[00:30:39] Brian Childs: Right.
[00:30:39] Brian Childs: And so data architecture would be like, how do you store it?
[00:30:41] Brian Childs: How do you join it?
[00:30:43] Brian Childs: The availability of analysis.
[00:30:45] Brian Childs: To what degree are you able to ask sophisticated questions of your data?
[00:30:50] Brian Childs: And by your data I mean across all of the different systems that you have the other dimension.
[00:30:56] Brian Childs: So one would be data architecture.
[00:30:58] Brian Childs: The other dimension would be cross functional collaboration.
[00:31:01] Brian Childs: So to what degree do different teams across your customer lifecycle work together or don't to set priorities.
[00:31:09] Brian Childs: So those are the two that's on the side of the company.
[00:31:14] Brian Childs: It'd be like data architecture, cross functional collaboration.
[00:31:17] Brian Childs: If you don't have good data architecture, you're not going to be able to answer sophisticated questions.
[00:31:22] Brian Childs: It doesn't matter if you want to be like, we want to hit retention.
[00:31:24] Brian Childs: It's like if you can't measure things with data very hard.
[00:31:29] Brian Childs: The cross functional collaboration, I would say is probably the both of these are significant, but I'd say the cross functional collaboration is a thing that people verbalize a lot more, which is like we are so siloed or these other people are doing this other thing over here, that sort of thing.
[00:31:42] Brian Childs: So the third dimension would be the thing that's related to the program leader.
[00:31:47] Brian Childs: I would simplify.
[00:31:48] Brian Childs: The qualification of this is just, have you done this before?
[00:31:54] Brian Childs: So you have this two x two matrix.
[00:31:56] Brian Childs: So you can be like, here's where our organization is.
[00:31:57] Brian Childs: And then you could lay on top of that the program leaders experience and you could say, if the organization has a high sophistication of data, the use of data, and a high degree of cross functional collaboration that represents the potential for customer education.
[00:32:16] Brian Childs: I would even argue like sophisticated marketing programs, then you put on your leader on that and say, can they execute or take advantage of that opportunity that's presented by the organization and that will rely on the experience of the program leader.
[00:32:31] Brian Childs: And so in this scorecard, this scorecard functionally measures these things.
[00:32:35] Brian Childs: So what it does, it kicks out a score that says, to the degree to which, based upon the questions we can assess whether or not you have the potential around your data to impact the kinds of things where customer education can play a role.
[00:32:49] Brian Childs: Is there cross functional collaboration taking place?
[00:32:51] Brian Childs: And do you have the experience to be able to make or capitalize on the opportunity that's presented by your organization?
[00:32:58] Brian Childs: And more often than not, the likelihood is that the person who's taking it has the process knowledge to be able to capitalize on it.
[00:33:06] Brian Childs: But the organization itself either lacks the data architecture or the cross functional collaboration, or both to high degrees.
[00:33:13] Brian Childs: And so those would be things where it'd be like if you're going to focus on something, focus on impacting those two aspects.
[00:33:18] Ramli John: Interesting.
[00:33:19] Ramli John: That's just blowing my mind.
[00:33:21] Ramli John: I think that makes a ton of sense.
[00:33:22] Ramli John: I've seen a lot of organizations who have struggle with that as well.
[00:33:26] Ramli John: I guess there's also evangelizing the training program within the organization is what I'm hearing, where you're really like, here's what we could achieve with this.
[00:33:37] Ramli John: What you mentioned earlier around using the data for the sales process or impacting in terms of customer lifetime value, and this is what resources I need to get that installed really is what hindering a lot of training programs to reach its full potential is what I'm hearing you're saying.
[00:33:58] Brian Childs: Yeah, and it's the classic, like best time to plant a tree was ten years ago, next best time today.
[00:34:05] Brian Childs: So it's kind of like recognizing that.
[00:34:10] Brian Childs: I think the most important outcome of some of that is just being able to have a conversation about where the priorities lie and honestly whether or not the organization really wants it.
[00:34:19] Brian Childs: They could say that they want to have this kind of sophisticated program and they want to do these kinds of impacts, but at the end of the day, training programs, customer education, it's a wrench.
[00:34:30] Brian Childs: So it's like if I got a wrench and it's a solution in search of a problem.
[00:34:36] Brian Childs: So I think the first thing to ask is, what are we trying to solve?
[00:34:43] Brian Childs: If I'm talking to an organization that says they have the problem around maybe lead qualification or whatever, it's like, okay, well then let's talk about all the different potential ways that we could solve that.
[00:34:54] Brian Childs: If they want to solve a retention problem, then I would say, well, customer education is a very successful way of doing it.
[00:35:01] Brian Childs: But to do it, we need to recognize that the journey that we're going to take to get there is going to be about us having a very informed conversation about our data architecture and across functional collaboration.
[00:35:13] Brian Childs: If we're not willing to talk about cross functional collaboration data, then we're not really talking about driving retention.
[00:35:20] Brian Childs: You're trying to plant some magic beans in some poor customer education leader and have them just kind of like, they're trying to like, I'm going to be an apple tree.
[00:35:30] Brian Childs: We're going to build them like right in the middle of a freeway.
[00:35:32] Brian Childs: You're not going to get any apples off of that thing.
[00:35:35] Ramli John: I love it.
[00:35:36] Ramli John: I appreciate all this analogies you've been sharing now with the beans and the driving.
[00:35:41] Brian Childs: Sorry, I'm like, beans and apples and roads.
[00:35:45] Brian Childs: You're like, okay, man, where's the thread?
[00:35:48] Ramli John: It's good because it's such a great education technique where especially with very non tactical or non physical concepts, people can visualize it.
[00:36:01] Ramli John: So do appreciate it.

[00:36:03] Top Tips for Creating a World-Class Training Program

[00:36:03] Ramli John: I want to ask around specifically a company that you've worked with in the past or you've seen where their training program is world class.
[00:36:15] Ramli John: Is there one that sticks out for you?
[00:36:17] Ramli John: Or like if people are going to check out what training programs should look like on the outside, you should check out this company.
[00:36:25] Ramli John: Is there any ones that specifically stand up for you that you've seen in the past?
[00:36:31] Brian Childs: Well, I would go back to the statements around.
[00:36:36] Brian Childs: So rather than saying like, this brand does it really well, I think it's important.
[00:36:41] Brian Childs: You could point HubSpot and be like HubSpot Academy and like Courtney Sembler or what she does is really incredible.
[00:36:46] Brian Childs: But the qualities that make it, I think it's better to focus on what are the qualities that would make for a good program?
[00:36:53] Brian Childs: Rather than why is it good?
[00:36:54] Brian Childs: Because it's very easy to look at some programs, particularly smaller, maybe like mid market SaaS companies.
[00:37:01] Brian Childs: And what you're observing from the outside is herculean effort on the part of an individual or small group of people that are pushing that forward and that they might be working against headwinds.
[00:37:12] Brian Childs: So it's kind of hard to tell from the outside.
[00:37:14] Brian Childs: Sometimes you're looking at a program as to what's actually functionally causing it.
[00:37:19] Brian Childs: I would encourage people to think about and develop ways or use things like the scorecard.
[00:37:28] Brian Childs: You can use the scorecard when you're going as an interview guide, too.
[00:37:33] Brian Childs: So if you're looking for work in customer education, ask those questions to the company that you're interviewing and get them to divulge those things, because if you can, you can build a profile around it.
[00:37:46] Brian Childs: It's not that a company is doing it really well.
[00:37:49] Brian Childs: The question is, what are the underlying factors that are resulting in a company being able to do it well?
[00:37:55] Brian Childs: And each one of those cross functional collaboration, data architecture, program leadership, each one of those can change.
[00:38:03] Brian Childs: So what was good two years ago at a company, maybe through a reorg or through the realities of budget changes or a person left and got a new job, each one of those could dramatically change the current state, even if they were really good a couple of years ago.
[00:38:21] Brian Childs: So I would refrain from saying this company is doing it, but well.
[00:38:27] Brian Childs: And I'd encourage people rather to understand that the fundamental architecture of what causes programs to be good is more important than the brand name itself.
[00:38:38] Brian Childs: There are good programs out there, but I'd equally say that there are really phenomenal people driving them, and they might be working against severe headwinds to do it.
[00:38:49] Ramli John: All right, I will link the scorecard.
[00:38:51] Ramli John: I love that.
[00:38:51] Ramli John: A suggestion.
[00:38:52] Ramli John: If you're going to an interview about customer education, ask them those questions.
[00:38:55] Ramli John: That will be helpful.
[00:38:58] Brian Childs: The original version I ever built with those things was actually like an interview guide for myself.
[00:39:01] Brian Childs: When I was looking at programs, I'm like, I don't want to go into dumpster fire.
[00:39:04] Brian Childs: So how can I avoid this and get people to answer questions that they don't?
[00:39:08] Brian Childs: I was doing my own sqls.
[00:39:09] Brian Childs: I'm just sort of like, is this a sales qualified lead for me to join this company?
[00:39:13] Brian Childs: So use it in that way if you want.
[00:39:16] Brian Childs: I don't care if people filled out multiple times.
[00:39:19] Ramli John: I love it.

[00:39:20] Career Power-Ups and Creating a Star Map of an Organization

[00:39:20] Ramli John: I want to shift gears and talk about career power ups.
[00:39:23] Ramli John: I know you've been in marketing now for over a decade.
[00:39:25] Ramli John: You mentioned some of the companies you worked with.
[00:39:27] Ramli John: Moss, looking at your LinkedIn profile.
[00:39:30] Ramli John: You also work at top industries in GE.
[00:39:33] Ramli John: What's a power up that's helped you accelerate your career?
[00:39:36] Ramli John: And it could be something that's a concept, or it could be something that's specific to marketing.
[00:39:44] Brian Childs: Yeah.
[00:39:44] Brian Childs: So I have this habit that I developed that comes from, I was an undergrad in cultural anthropology.
[00:39:53] Brian Childs: Okay.
[00:39:54] Brian Childs: And so I do this thing that I call creating a star map of an organization.
[00:40:00] Brian Childs: So think of it as like trying to diagram the constellation.
[00:40:04] Brian Childs: And in anthropology, one of the activities that you do is developing a power structure diagram of a community.
[00:40:15] Brian Childs: And I will develop a power structured diagram of organizations to try to determine where reputational power or influence comes from.
[00:40:30] Brian Childs: And so here's the way I do it, is when I enter in an organization, particularly in the very beginning, I will keep track of where people point to.
[00:40:41] Brian Childs: When you ask, who knows this information?
[00:40:43] Brian Childs: And be very intentional about it.
[00:40:44] Brian Childs: Be like, oh, this is a really interesting report, or who knows?
[00:40:48] Brian Childs: I'm trying to figure out about x, who knows about that?
[00:40:52] Brian Childs: Keep track of the person that you're talking to and who they point you to.
[00:40:56] Brian Childs: What you're going to find is that people, after you ask the same question, like, who knows the most about our data analysis or who knows the most about the salesforce, like, what's going on in Salesforce?
[00:41:12] Brian Childs: After you talk to enough people, everyone starts pointing to the same.
[00:41:18] Brian Childs: Usually, like, you'll find that information resides in very few people in an organization.
[00:41:24] Brian Childs: And those people, because they own the information or because they're relied on by everybody else, they have an outsized impact on decision making.
[00:41:35] Brian Childs: And oftentimes, particularly in engineering or very technical kinds of organizations, like when I worked at GE, those people are not the ones that get invited to leadership meetings.
[00:41:47] Brian Childs: They're the ones that are down in the basement crunching numbers the whole time.
[00:41:50] Brian Childs: But they might not be in the meeting, but you know what?
[00:41:53] Brian Childs: They are in the meeting, because everybody else is relying on their version of the information that they think that that person knows.
[00:42:01] Brian Childs: And so if you can identify who those people are, if you can create a star map.
[00:42:04] Brian Childs: So, like, think of the stars of an organization.
[00:42:07] Brian Childs: If you can create a star map, you're going to find out.
[00:42:10] Brian Childs: Developing relationships with those people gives you an inordinate amount of power in an organization, because you can then say, like, well, I was talking to Jerry, and know as a person who knows Jerry, and they're like, you know, like, if you can get to be that person's friend, you can get direct access to a lot of influence.
[00:42:30] Brian Childs: And more importantly, you can skip past a lot of what is derived knowledge.
[00:42:35] Brian Childs: And in organizations, there tends to be a lot of derived knowledge of people who saw a report that that person made, and that's their interpretation of it.
[00:42:42] Brian Childs: It's kind of this whole go to the primary source material, and if you ask questions of who knows this and keep track and be like, this person said that there was that person, this person said it was that person.
[00:42:54] Brian Childs: This person said it was this other person over there.
[00:42:56] Brian Childs: And then when I asked them, they said it was the same person.
[00:42:58] Brian Childs: So you can start realizing that everybody's actually just referencing very few sources of information.
[00:43:06] Brian Childs: It's a hack to get to where the power and influential power resides within an organization.
[00:43:11] Brian Childs: So create a star map.
[00:43:14] Ramli John: That's such an interesting advice.
[00:43:18] Ramli John: I'm going to try this out.
[00:43:20] Ramli John: I'm going to try this out where I work at AppCus and see how it goes.
[00:43:25] Ramli John: I guess it also depends on what you're asking for.
[00:43:28] Ramli John: If it's about Salesforce, Jerry, if it's about, I don't know, another topic around our CRM or maybe our email marketing program, it would be this person.
[00:43:39] Ramli John: So now you might have different maps based on specific knowledge.
[00:43:44] Ramli John: Is that how you're thinking about that?
[00:43:47] Brian Childs: Yeah.
[00:43:48] Brian Childs: What you'll end up with is you'll end up with a lot of people pointing to the same individuals around the most important topics or the most important pieces of information within a company.
[00:44:04] Brian Childs: And so there'll be a lot of stuff that's just sort of like, I don't know, everybody knows there's some people that know HubSpot.
[00:44:09] Brian Childs: So sometimes it'll be like, who knows a tool best?
[00:44:11] Brian Childs: And that's helpful because you can skip past a lot of folks.
[00:44:14] Brian Childs: The more interesting things are around.
[00:44:17] Brian Childs: To extend sort of the cultural anthropology analogy here is it's like to understand the ethnography of an organization to be like, which of these people?
[00:44:26] Brian Childs: Maybe they're not the CEO, maybe they're not even the senior executives.
[00:44:29] Brian Childs: Which of these people are the ones that are describing for this entire organization how the sun goes up and down in our world.
[00:44:35] Brian Childs: Why do we believe that this is what the competitive landscape looks like?
[00:44:39] Brian Childs: Well, it's like, it might be because there's one or two people that either have data or have a tremendous amount of influence on the way that the perception is.
[00:44:49] Brian Childs: If you can understand that, it's like you can just short circuit a lot of the cross functional inefficiency that goes with hierarchy and just go directly to those sources and be like, hey, I have a couple of questions.
[00:45:01] Brian Childs: Tell me how this works.
[00:45:02] Brian Childs: And you can get right to the individuals that have that.
[00:45:06] Ramli John: I love that.
[00:45:07] Ramli John: And it's all about what you mentioned earlier around helping you get buy in cross functional collaboration and really helping you level up, I guess, and get stuff going if you need to.
[00:45:21] Brian Childs: Yeah, it's like, use the influence of the organization to your advantage and oftentimes more often than not, it is disconnected from the hierarchies that are installed around leadership structure.
[00:45:36] Brian Childs: Oftentimes there's a whole separate, invisible, horizontal aspect to it about how information flows.

[00:45:42] Brian Childs on Thought Industries, Moz, and Learning Outcomes

[00:45:42] Ramli John: Your organization if you enjoyed this episode, you'd love the marketing Powerups newsletter.
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[00:46:19] Ramli John: Thanks to Mary Sullivan for creating the artwork and design.
[00:46:21] Ramli John: And thank you to Fisal Kygo for editing the intro video.
[00:46:24] Ramli John: And of course, thank you for listening.
[00:46:27] Ramli John: That's all for now.
[00:46:28] Ramli John: Have a powered update marketing power ups.
[00:46:34] Brian Childs: Until the next episode.