Success League Radio
Success League Radio
Transforming Customer Success: Harnessing Digital Education and Data-Driven Strategies with Casey Trujillo and Todd Kirk
Unlock the secrets to transforming customer education into a powerhouse for customer success. Join us as we learn from Casey Trujillo and Todd Kirk of Brainstorm, who bring a wealth of experience in professional services, SaaS product development, and customer success strategies. Discover how Brainstorm helps organizations implement consistent training practices, using change management principles to drive software adoption and organizational change. Find out how this approach prevents customers from improvising their educational processes, which can negatively impact their success.
How can digital education revolutionize your customer success strategy? We explore this question by comparing it to Tesla’s innovative user experiences, emphasizing that customers crave ownership of their success without constant intervention from customer success managers. Our conversation sheds light on the importance of data-driven, engaging digital education experiences, especially for early-stage companies transitioning from personal interactions to scalable digital solutions. We dissect the balance between emotion and data in creating effective educational content and how organizations can harness this to enhance customer relationships.
Data isn't just a metric—it's a tool for driving business results. We discuss how tracking user behavior can boost customer retention and software renewal, introducing the concept of "brilliant basics" for long-term engagement. Discover how to optimize persona training strategies to meet diverse user needs, from daily administrators to high-level decision-makers. Learn how microlearning and short-form content can transform digital education, making it adaptable, effective, and engaging. As B2B customers increasingly demand consumer-like experiences, explore how companies can rethink their training strategies to create impactful content that resonates with modern users.
Welcome to Innovations in Leadership, a Success League radio production. This is a podcast focused on customer success and the leaders who are designing and implementing best practices in our field. This podcast is brought to you by The Success League, a consulting and training firm focused on developing customer success programs that drive revenue. My name is Kristen Hayer and I'm the host of Innovations in Leadership and the founder and CEO of The Success League, and I have two guests today, and I'm so excited that they have joined the podcast this afternoon. Casey Trujillo and Todd Kirk are the SVP and AVP for Brainstorm respectively, and we were both booth neighbors recently at the Zero-In Conference in Washington DC and got to talking about customer education, and today we're going to be talking. Got to talking about customer education, and today we're going to be talking about the importance of customer education in a customer success strategy. So, Casey and Todd, welcome to the show.
Todd Kirk:Thank you, Kristen, so glad to be here.
Kristen Hayer:Hey, before we get into today's topic, how did you each land in the field of customer success? I realize you aren't CS professionals yourself per se, but now that you're kind of working with people in our field, how did you end up here?
Casey Trujillo:Todd, you go first.
Todd Kirk:Well, I have been at Brainstorm now for about 12 years and when I started, my focus was actually in professional services in project management for Microsoft. So Microsoft, when I first started working here, was moving to the cloud and I was brought in as an advisor to help their customers figure out how to make that transition. So I did a lot of travel. Professional Services is a fun route. I moved from professional services into our SaaS product eventually, where I helped with the development of the campaigns and the resources and the content that would be used by customers to drive adoption of their tools and then from that basically just learned a lot of really awesome secret sauce, and my role then shifted more into a client success role of helping our other SaaS partners figure out how they could scale and support their customers with better online experiences.
Casey Trujillo:And Kristen for me, I'm a customer success manager in hiding how they could scale and support their customers with better online experiences. So one of the first startups that I worked for gosh it's been 18 years ago we had a platform that helped state and local higher academic be able to log in support tickets, request for improvements with their computer or if the network was down or whatever. It was a platform that people could register support tickets to the IT team or facilities teams that they could follow up with. I created the first customer success team there, though I didn't know it should be called customer success. I just thought somebody should focus on renewals and try to set that up. Since then, I've learned a ton from people that actually know what they're doing, like yourself, but I always like to say I am a customer success manager. I've just never worn that title. So I'm honored to be on this podcast talking to professionals out there.
Kristen Hayer:No, I think it's great. There's a lot of people that kind of got into customer success in sort of a sideways fashion, including me.
Kristen Hayer:I came out of sales and so you know, people come out of sales, people come out of services, people come out of support, people come out of music, people come out of urban studies. I mean it is really crazy where everybody comes from. It makes our field really unique, because we get so many different kinds of people with different experiences. So that's why I always love to ask that question, because there's a lot of CS people in hiding in different places. Yeah, I want to hear a little bit more about Brainstorm. Tell us about the company. How did it get its start and what do you focus on?
Casey Trujillo:Oh, great question. So Brainstorm, we are a software that helps enable your point of contact. So you sell to a customer, you have a point of contact and that point of contact gets your software usually set up. And then they have to train those employees. Well, this software enables that point of contact to actually message out to the users the way that you would want them to, presents in front of them the right education courses that you would want them to be able to take, gathers the survey, feedback, intel all of that information and bundles it up in one nice neat package.
Casey Trujillo:So that's where I really started to learn about customer success is our first customer was doing this with Microsoft, and Microsoft had a mandate about three, four years ago where every one of their customer success managers had to go through ProSci change management, and they wanted to do that so they could help their customers better envision why change is so important and when they work with a customer success manager. These are the principles that you should work with. Well funny part about it, Kristen we went out and trained all of them. We went and learned how to do change management. We knew how to speak end user, so we put those two things together and we went out and spoke. So that's what Brainstorm does for not just Microsoft but for a lot of software vendors out there. We help bundle up change management, make it very scalable.
Kristen Hayer:So then the customer can actually go implement it and use it. I love that. I think the thing that really resonates with me about that is that it keeps your customers from winging it. A lot of people are out there winging it with training and I think that it hurts customer success in the long run when they're doing that because it's sort of like, well, sure, you might be really good at enablement or you might not. It might be your side gig that you got assigned to do because you happen to be the person that's spearheading this effort. So I don't know, do you run into things like that, where it's sort of been hit and miss and then you come in and your solution really helps to make it consistent?
Casey Trujillo:All the time. So our first conversation when we come in is you know, if you could wave a magic wand and guarantee a hundred percent success, what would your employees be doing with this software you purchased? What would they be doing differently? And they're like, oh man, we'd want our users to do this, this and this. And then we say, okay, so what's the current state? Are they doing that? Oh, no, they're not Okay. So if they're not, how many of them aware that they should be working that way? How many people have actually taken part of any product education? Oh, I don't even know. Then they turn to the software vendor and say, hey, how many people have actually taken any training? And they go, oh, I don't know. And then they finally find out it's less than 1% of their users. Well, no wonder people haven't utilized the software the way that the customer and the software vendor want to. So, yeah, that's a perfect example of when we're coming in. We're making the easy button for both parties to be able to go out and get that scalable adoption.
Kristen Hayer:Yeah, I think that's so great. I was really shocked with a recent engagement. We did that. There was a project management software in place at this company and I hadn't used it before. So I got set up with the account because I was going to be helping the team with some reporting in that tool and the first thing it presented to me was a bunch of little training modules and I went through them and then I was talking to one of the team members and I said hey, when you went through this training module, what did you think about this thing? It seems like we're not using that. And she's like what training module?
Kristen Hayer:And I'm like the training modules that are right there when you first log in. And no, but there was no consistency, nobody had gone through those. I was literally the only person, I think, that had actually gotten trained on the software they'd been using for over a year, and so it was. Yeah, it was pretty crazy. So I think you meet a real need that's out there. I went to your talk on customer education at the Zero-In Conference and you ran a survey during that to the audience and I think that turned up some really interesting ideas. Can you share what you found most interesting or surprising?
Todd Kirk:Yeah, you know, I was actually really shocked myself whenever we ran the survey. We did it live right. So we had about 50 attendees in our session, and they all chimed in and we asked them a bunch of questions that we really were curious to get the answers to. One of the questions that we asked all of the attendees there was what would be the primary way that you would define your role, and, by and large, somewhere around 80 or 90% of the attendees said I see myself as a relationship manager, and that really really at least at the start surprised me, because what we oftentimes hear from leadership is that, no, you are a renewal manager, it's your job to keep them paying, but that's not how most CSMs see their job. They see themselves as the relationship person.
Todd Kirk:Now, the other thing that really shocked me, though, was that then we asked them well, how many customers do you have? And somewhere around over 50% said that they had around 100 plus. So then the question is well, you see yourself as a relationship manager, but how are you actually managing relationships with over 100 people? That just doesn't seem to add up. Meanwhile, they were spending hours and hours every single week training and teaching their end customer how to do things. So the thing that really caught my attention was there's a disconnect between how the CS professional sees their job and how leadership sees their job, and there's also a disconnect between what the CS person sees their job as and what they're actually doing. So there's a disconnect on either side, and so that was really fascinating to me as we went through and really just tried to get understanding from the CSMs in the field and what their job looks like today.
Kristen Hayer:Yeah, I was pretty surprised by some of the things that were on that survey when you popped it up on the screen kind of in the middle of the presentation. The relationship piece didn't surprise me as much as that. There was a lot of other stuff they were doing that wasn't relationship driven, that you know. It was kind of in there, I don't know what. What did you think, Casey?
Casey Trujillo:Well, Kristen, the thing that was shocking and I again I made a post on this on LinkedIn today about Tesla Tesla didn't come in the conversation and saying how do we make our car better than a Prius? We got to have a better battery life, we got to be able to have this feature or that feature. They went in and asked the question why are people not buying more EV cars? And the number one answer they found was because EV cars aren't cool. That was it. That was the whole premise. Like we got to make it cool, so people want to have a Tesla. That's how they built it.
Casey Trujillo:So for me, the truth came out when we said what's one thing that if you could have, that would impact your renewals? What would be the one thing you want? And again, you're in total control, you have the ability to do it and 53% of the CSM said a better digital education experience. They know what the problem is is no one's taking education, and so they take it upon themselves because I'm building a relationship. Hey, I'll go do that training for those new hires. Hey, I'll. We came out with our new AI model. Yeah, I'll do some training for you. I'll do this. I'll do that to further the relationship, but what they're doing is spending all their time training and they're not getting strategic. And so they recognize that with that answer. If half of the CSM said I wish I had better digital education to empower my customer, that's the cool Tesla right there. That's what they're wanting and they're just not getting it.
Kristen Hayer:Why do you think that is? What are the factors at play? Do you?
Casey Trujillo:Think oh, my gosh Todd, you start going on this one because I know you're passionate about it.
Todd Kirk:Well, I think one of the big gaps that happens is that we kind of assume that everything has to be done in a human fashion, what probably better said. There's an assumption that the best way to do it is through human interaction. So if I'm going to have a great relationship, then I've got to provide a lot of value, and the way I'm going to provide a lot of value is by doing a lot of the work for you customer. But the dirty little secret that I think most people ignore is that customers do want to own their own success. If they didn't have to talk to you as a CSM, they would probably prefer that, because the truth is they likely have dozens of CSMs that support their organization because they're subscribing to dozens of SaaS applications.
Todd Kirk:So it's not that people don't want to have a digital experience, it's that people don't know how to make a good one. So when people say, well, your digital training sucks, well, that's not them saying I don't want a digital experience. It's saying I don't want your crappy digital experience. So one of the big gaps there is that CSMs end up providing training because they feel or doing a lot of this like low level lift for the customer, because they feel like that's the way that they're going to maintain the relationship with the customer. Well, all that means is you become an order taker and it becomes a transactional relationship, which is the opposite of what you want. So you shouldn't be spending all of your time constantly retraining people how to do stuff or doing work for the customer if you can enable them to do it on their own. And I just think a lot of organizations don't believe that they can do that, because that skill set isn't something that most organizations have learned how to develop.
Casey Trujillo:Kristen, I'd double down on a couple things. Number one, I'd say they don't work with professionals like you. They don't go and interact with someone to have them come in and consult, because what takes place is a lot of people choose emotion over data. I created this wonderful experience. It's just the CS and the AEs. People aren't telling them about it and it's like let's go back to the data. What does the data tell you? How many people are interacting with your digital education? I'm sorry, but that's the truth of when you go. Look at it. In less than 1%, Kristen. I have yet and I've worked with over a hundred software vendors, I have yet to find one have more than 2% of their entire licensed users go in and take their digital education less than 2%. But no one will recognize that.
Casey Trujillo:But if you came in and you were consulting with an organization, you'd say, hey, let's walk through the customer experience. Okay, what's that data look like? And then you got to make a data decision so why aren't people doing that? And then you go survey them and then you get feedback and saying, gosh, it's too long. You don't give me empower, you don't do this, this and then act on it. But too many of us decide that emotion is how we're going to roll. We built something beautiful and it's their fault for not taking advantage of it. So those would be my two points. I would double down on.
Kristen Hayer:Yeah, I think that that is right.
Kristen Hayer:I think when companies get started too, there's this you know and I think this makes sense at the very beginning of an early stage company right, you want to have a lot of contact points with your customers and you want to be in there and you want to be hands-on and you want your CS professional or professionals to be hands-on, because that's part of learning your product market fit. And unfortunately, what we see a lot of is companies who never get over that and get to the place where they can create something that's scalable, because they still want that. It's almost like it's their preference to have that personal touch, because then they get to hear all of the things from the customers directly. But the customers, meanwhile, have moved on and they're like, yeah, I got this great product and I just want to use it. I don't want to sit around and have a big little conversation with a trainer for an hour, you know, and so it's like there's a mismatch, I think, between what customers really want and think is excellence and what the company wants and thinks is excellence.
Casey Trujillo:I was going to say I don't think. It's small organizations, even small SaaS vendors. Todd and I were working with one they're over 500 million in ARR and we were working with their customer education team and they told us we have no insight because they sell primarily through the channel and the channel then teams up with their CS team and then if there's any issues, it goes to the customer education team if they can't get adoption. So we asked this team hey, like what does your data look like? And they go we don't know. Oh, okay, but their top requirement for a new LMS they were buying was are you SCORM compliant? And you're like, wait a second, that's the question.
Casey Trujillo:You're asking Is it SCORM compliant? You're not asking can I get visibility? Can I see if my partners are actually going out and pushing this adoption? I can't see the impact on product usage. Oh, my wrong question. So I love how you're saying that is is sometimes we get what we call those vanity metrics, where it makes us look good but it doesn't move the customer or the business forward, and I understand it. It's hard to get out of that, but if you're really trying to make the impact you want to make, you've got to get outside of the vanity metrics.
Kristen Hayer:Yeah, yeah. What other customer education data do you think is important to share with this audience today?
Todd Kirk:Oh, so good. You know I love the term vanity metrics, because one of the things that's problematic is, well, two things. And I want to hit on something that Casey said before that I think is important, which is when you think about most customer education, the metrics that they are tracking are not actually relevant to the outcome that the business is trying to achieve. So, you know, the thing that I might end up saying as a customer education professional is we had a 90 percent completion rating on our course. You know like that sounds really, really good, but well, how many people actually took it? You know like 10. How many users do you actually have A million? So, all of a sudden, that 90% completion rating is really terrible, because we tend to try to focus on the things that make us look good right, going back to that idea of vanity metrics rather than the things that really matter. So one really key one, and I really love this idea of a patch rate, which is what percentage of my user base actually goes through training. Well, I was talking with another vendor just yesterday and we asked him that question. He said 90%. We have a 90% attach rate and I was like, well, that's great. So tell me what you mean by that? And he's like, well, 90% of our known user base have created a login in our academy. I'm like, again, that's a vanity metric, that means nothing, like what percentage of those people actually watched anything? Did it change their behavior at all? And he was like, well, I don't even know if I can get that metric right. So what we tend to focus on are the things that are really easy to see and the things that make us look good, rather than actually focus on driving a result for the customer. So a couple of thoughts there that I think are important. The first place and I have a LinkedIn post about this, which is one of the things you have to be able to do is tie your learning to adoption, and there's a couple of ways you could do this.
Todd Kirk:One of the most common ways is through surveys, and we do that, I actually think qualitative tracking of. Did the user report back that they are going to use the application? Did they report that they intend to use the application? Did they talk about specific features that they think are going to be game changers for them? So surveys can be really helpful, and so, if you are going to use qualitative data, like a survey, though you should focus on. You know, is it going to be a use case that's going to change? Are there blockers that are preventing them from adopting? That's very different than what did you think of this course, which is what most surveys are right. We usually look for CSAT, and CSAT doesn't really have a big impact on adoption. What matters is can I get the value out of this and big impact on adoption? What matters is can I get the value out of this and am I confident I can do my job without bothering other people? So those are some things you got to think about if you're going to survey.
Todd Kirk:The second way to do is actually tie to usage. You can integrate, if you're really clever and good and thoughtful about this, to the actual usage behaviors that you care about. One organization we work with calls that the brilliant basics. What are the brilliant basics of the things that a user needs to do for me to feel confident that they're going to renew in the long term and then track and see. Is there a difference between those who consume education and those who actually end up using the product? But I like to say that Mao is mid. So if you get into this idea of looking at monthly active usage and even specific usage. It's not just did the user use it, is it making them better at their job? And the real golden goose is if you can actually tie down to the business result that the organization is trying to get to, and that can be a qualitative measure. Again, you can survey users and ask if it's saving them time, if it's helping them close deals faster or if it's helping them do whatever your software is intended to do, or you can actually, if possible, you need to help the customer identify those metrics. So that's one where they might be able to track that internally.
Todd Kirk:Failure rates on the manufacturing line If you're manufacturing software, maybe it's deals closed. If you're a seller, maybe it's contracts signed. If you're in legal, there's various things that you can identify and see if those things are getting better, faster and stronger. So ultimately, it needs to move from how well did the people consume to how many people are consuming. So it needs to move from how good was the interaction to what is the reach of the interaction. Then, once you move from that, you need to say what information can I learn from the user and about the user because of that interaction. How is it impacting their behavior and how is that behavior driving a result for the business? So that's kind of the way I would think through it logically things that you need to do and most organizations just aren't mature enough to do that yet. And it's not because it's hard, it's just because we haven't really thought through what that needs to look like and found the right solution to be able to pull that data into a single view.
Kristen Hayer:Yeah, I think this is true in a lot of CS too. I mean, one of the things that we teach about CS in general is that it doesn't even matter if it's the thing that you think your software does for the customer. It's what the customer wants the software to do for their business, and that's going to vary from company to company, and so it's really hard to get at that measure. But it is the most important thing that indicates whether they're going to renew or not, and so getting to the data is a big challenge. But understanding that the data you're trying to get to is not the vanity metrics is a step in the right direction, I think.
Casey Trujillo:We see it in CS with QBRs. Right, there's always a debate about QBRs what are the impact and effectiveness of QBRs? And because sometimes CS feels like, hey, I got to hit my quota, so I get my bonus. I got to do X percent of QBRs. Well, now the QBR doesn't mean anything. But if the QBR is there to set up and say, hey, what we're doing in the next nine months or 12 months, that's what the QBR is about. It's presenting those insights. Here's how I'm going to make you more money or save you more money, is by doing and implementing these things. Who doesn't want to sign up for that QBR? And so it's similar in the CS. You see this all the time. Or NPS or whatever it might be to do it, just to say you did it. That doesn't make an impact. And that's when people start saying, well, why are we doing this? Well, it wasn't that it was wrong, it's just the approach you're taking is wrong. So, yeah, I think you can see that all over in SaaS.
Kristen Hayer:Yeah, I think so. As you've got CS leaders out there who are thinking about training their customers, how would you coach them to think about the different personas that they're trying to train? Because they're trying to train administrators, of course they're sort of like their day-to-day contacts often, but then there's the whole user base, usually some set of people in their company they're trying to train. They also need to educate the people who are going to look at is this solution successful for our organization or not? So maybe kind of more the decision makers. How do you suggest they approach that?
Casey Trujillo:I'll give you that famous answer, Kristen, that no one loves which. It depends, right. So an example of so this software vendor. They're the leader in call recording business intelligence software. So majority of people use them out there in the market. They understand that not every user persona is of equal value and they set up the purpose of their CS team, their professional services and their customer education around the personas that matter most to them. The reason why I say it depends is because their software actually has different capabilities for the executive teams that they want to get to. So, for example, in their call recording software, if a CS person's on a call and the customer starts complaining about you don't have this feature, you don't have this, you don't have that, they take that snippet, put it to their ServiceNow or Jira board or wherever, and then the development team can go in here exactly from the customer it's already categorized. So when they're onboarding they target the people that are of head of product and saying here's how this is going to benefit you Now, because that leadership wants those insights. They then are consistently asking the CS team or the sales team have you put those comments in there? We're not even going to review your ticket about an upgrade feature, unless I see that from there, they can attack higher up personas because the software actually has a benefit.
Casey Trujillo:If you're going to try to target a higher persona and your software doesn't actually impact them, now the business outcomes of your software could impact them, but there's not a real good piece of your software that really does it, besides a dashboard. I don't know if I'm targeting them. I might go down a level and go to business managers. So you really got to think about the personas and then the impact that the persona has in forcing adoption of the software. That's one of the things you really want to think about. If legal is using this, does that force the sales team to use it, or whatever your software might be? Think of your personas like that. That's what you want to start with.
Casey Trujillo:Then, of course, don't discount the general users, though, and again, that's where going back and doing one to many instructor-led training sessions, again you're going to get less than five percent of the org to attend. No one's going to remember what you talked about. People are in different technical levels of understanding things. Don't do it that way. If you want to get to the masses, you got to do the masses in a different way and what you want from the masses is insights, of time saved use cases, things like that Set that up for more information gathering. I wouldn't worry as much on adoption. I would focus on those mid managers and the user personas.
Todd Kirk:Yeah, and Casey, you highlighted a couple of things that I think are really important that I want to highlight, and then I want to add something else to that. So one is not all personas are equal to there are dependencies on different audiences. And then, three, there's usually not a great great solution for training the masses, and here's one of the things that I think is really important. If you think about in the supply chain, there's the concept of the last mile problem, right, so laying fiber optic cable from city to city is pretty easy, but then when I have to get it to every single house in a town, it's a totally different ballgame, and so one of the things that's a problem that I don't think a lot of CS people realize is you may have access to your admin or to your point of contact, and they're already invested, or at least we're told to be invested by a leader who might've forced them to purchase. So you have their ear and it's a little bit easier because you have a regular cadence with them. You can train them as needed when you go. But the problem is they are usually the gatekeeper to everyone else inside the organization and either what ends up happening is they tell you to train their people, and then you're constantly being asked to train a bunch of people that may or may not have any investment and you have no idea if it's having an impact. Or you're expecting them to go do that training and you have no idea how effective they're going to be at it, because they, again, are the gatekeeper.
Todd Kirk:So one of the key things to think about is one not all personas are created equal, so you need to understand who are the ones that are really going to help move the needle for you, but then, on top of that, you have to remember that you need to empower the right people in the organization to champion the results to the masses inside the organization, especially if you're a tool that is going to be used not by three people or five people, but by a hundred or a thousand, and a lot of SaaS tools are distributed widely and have very, very little penetration in actually reaching those audiences, and so that's the key thing you got to think about too is A they're not all equal. B there are some dependencies on different teams using it. And three, I need to make sure that I can really enable the champions who are going to have to push that out to the rest of the organization.
Kristen Hayer:Yeah, that out to the rest of the organization. Yeah, I think you know, Todd, as I think about your talk that you did at Zero In. I think one of the things that you made a good point about was the style of training, and you had us all do a little exercise and build out like how would you convey something to people? I thought it was very effective, and you sort of advocate for short form micro learning. Tell me more about that. What about that works for people?
Todd Kirk:Oh, so good. I love it. So a couple of things. The traditional way that we have always trained people is usually through long form training. A podcast is awesome, right, but the people who come and listen to this show are people who are already invested, right.
Todd Kirk:A 10 minute YouTube video Awesome Right, except for the fact that a 10 minute YouTube video is designed to entertain you and keep your attention so that Google can sell ads to you, not so that you can get better. So what we tend to do is we try to think about how am I going to train people and I'm going to leverage the things that I know that work. I built an audience of people who are invested, so maybe I should do long form content, or I need to entertain them, so I need to make you know 10 minute punchy YouTube videos. Either way, those are bad if you're trying to reach the masses, because generally when it comes to customer education, especially for B2B software, you are talking to people who don't care about you yet and the worst thing you can do is go in with content that assumes that they're already invested and interested in what you do and we're going to take the time and the investment to do it the data that I've looked at over the years and we've managed to put out content now for you know, for a long time my job was content production only right Out of about 10,000 videos that were ever produced in our platform. One of the things that we looked at was how long the video was and the consumption rate. If a video was less than 90 seconds, you had 80 plus percent of users who started the video completed. If it goes over three minutes now, you're dropping down from 80% to about 67%. If it gets over 10 minutes, it drops down to below 20%. So your likelihood of getting people to watch longer form content goes down drastically when you're working in a SaaS B2B training context.
Todd Kirk:So it's really important just to maintain eyeballs to keep your content short. But it's even more important than that, and one of the things that is really hard about building a sustainable digital education program is the fact that content changes fast. I have a SaaS product that changes really quickly and if I have a 10 minute video and now one minute of that changes, I just ruined the whole video. So one of the other reasons why micro learning is so critical to a SaaS business is it means you can be nimble If I change a feature or I change a menu, I may only have to update that one minute, versus now throwing out all 10 minutes because the other nine minutes were still relevant. The last piece of this is not only does it help you with content maintenance, but it also helps with content flexibility. It means I can reuse content in different contexts. If I have a bunch of one minute videos, they become Lego bricks that I can now string together in different experiences, and so that's a misnomer.
Todd Kirk:I think when people talk about microlearning, they just think it means to make stuff short, but really it also means those assets need to be self-contained. So if I make a one minute video that can stand on its own, well, then I can put it in a course, and it works, or I can send it to a user because they have a question, and it works. And so it's really important that, if you are going to invest in microlearning, that you don't just take your four hour curriculum that you used to do when you did half day onsite training with your customer and then break it up into one minute chunks that still all have to be viewed together in context. That doesn't work. So there is a mindset shift as well. It's not just about length, but it's about the format and how you actually structure the content of those videos too.
Kristen Hayer:Yeah, I think that's such an important point.
Kristen Hayer:We've been giving a lot of thought to this around our own training offerings that we have lately and it does enable you to use those things in more ways.
Kristen Hayer:You can use those things for marketing, you can use them for education, you can use them for support, and it just gives you tools that, like you said, it's like Legos you can just plug them in all over the place, and I think that's so fantastic, because there's such a need now, I think, for organizations to look at their users in a way that is different than we have in the past, because we're all becoming, as business consumers, more like consumer consumers, and we will expect these experiences that we're having with the businesses we work with to be more consumer like, and I think these consumer companies have done a really good job of nailing this.
Kristen Hayer:And in B2B, we're still like 20 years behind and it's pretty clunky, you know, and I think that's because we haven't really given thought to the fact that B2B customers are still consumers in the rest of their lives and they've had all these amazing experiences. And I got a Target, and Target is so amazing at knowing oh, kristen walked in. We got to route her around to where the throw pillows and the scented candles are because she will buy so much extra stuff than she went in there planning to buy.
Kristen Hayer:If we do that, like they know that level of stuff about consumers, right, we don't do that in B2B yet and I think you know they provide an excellent experience for kind of a budget store, right, and I've had lots of other consumer experiences that are here. And then you know Amazon is a great another great example right, they tell you what you want to buy on the homepage when you log in and you're like, oh yeah, I want to buy that thing. We are not there yet and we need to be there and we need to be there much faster. And I think the education piece of it is huge because we could be teaching people more, like consumer companies do, which is through avenues that we don't even consider, like social media, like advertising, and we're not doing that because we're B2B.
Casey Trujillo:Yeah, Kristen, it's funny. I made a pitch to a VC just this last week about a new product I'm coming up with and it's it's where you make a post online but you can do 10,000 words. And I'm going to do this new platform where, instead of 90 seconds, you can do 10 hours of videos. Like no, like no one's going to listen. I don't know why, when we walk into a business, we have the bell of forgetfulness, like all of a sudden, because we're in a corporate setting, users automatically change the way they like to learn and that they don't do this all the time on their phone. We're like no, they of course the way they like to learn, and that they don't do this all the time on their phone. We're like no, of course they want to come to this hour class that we're going to be holding.
Casey Trujillo:Or, of course, they want to go through a two hour digital training who, where, when and how. No one wants to do that. Just as laughable to think that someone would create a platform where you can make a tweet and it's 10,000 words. Of course not. We're always looking to make it shorter and shorter and shorter, and then, if I'm interested, I will go invest some time. But you got to hit me with something that's going to be impactful to me and you got to make it short and to the point. And you know Todd I follow him on LinkedIn, he is a guru at this and he'll help you in being able to do that in a way that's going to impact with people, because I always like to say Todd speaks, end user, most of us speak.
Kristen Hayer:Spanish. Todd speaks end user. That's fantastic. Well, you know, in my own experience as a leader, I found that education, whether it's internal or external, tends to be one of the first things that gets deprioritized. And I guess what advice would you have for leaders that are out there who you know are trying to make the case for this and are trying to help their businesses understand the need?
Todd Kirk:Well, okay, so I think there's some really good things there. Let me tell you a funny experience. Back when I was all long, long time ago, back when I was in college, I did a capstone in a strategy class. It was one of these simulations where you started a business and you had to take a strategy. I think I did that same one.
Kristen Hayer:Yeah.
Todd Kirk:It was really fun and I I slayed it Like I did really good to say what the Gen Z would say today right, I, just I rocked it. It was good. But what was interesting was one of the things that I noticed in the first practice rounds before I did. The real one was that there was an option to invest heavily in training your personnel and in that strategy class, whoever built it is like I think it was a cheat code. As soon as you said I'm going to invest in training, all of a sudden your strategy worked, so that we know whether that's through, you know, simulation, development or just lots of academic research that's been done for decades and decades and decades, or even just in our gut.
Todd Kirk:Right, everybody would say that we believe that training is going to have an impact. The reason we don't invest in it is because we've all had enough crappy training experiences that we don't believe that we should invest in something that's going to be bad, because we know that it's time intensive, it's laborious and there's kind of like a select number of people who really know how to do it well and what we tend to do as well. As we hire, especially in the SaaS world, we hire people who come out of traditional instructional design classes and they learn that. I should build a long SCORM package and that's what we put on an academy and we help people go that. And certification programs are great sometimes, but a lot of SaaS companies? Honestly, it's really stupid for you to invest in a certification because none of your customers are going to care. So there's a select set of words that can really care about certification. We build everything off of conventional wisdom that has not produced results historically.
Todd Kirk:So a couple of things that I think are important is if you know that training will work in your gut, well, why aren't you doing it? And most of the time it's. Well, we don't know the right way to do it, so let's just not do it, because nothing is better than doing the wrong thing, and I think that's where most people end up. So a couple of thoughts that I think are important too it goes back to that idea of data is why are you building this training program to begin with? What are you hoping it's going to do? And unfortunately, most people focus on I need to teach people how to do something, but when it comes down to like actual literacy of an application, that's important, but it's in the middle of the process, like, unfortunately, we don't invest in thinking about training as part of the process. It's usually put as this appendage to the process If I'm going to go develop a training program, awesome. But then I'm going to have a CSM who's going to come in on the call and say I'm here to be your solution. I got all the answers oh, we happen to have an academy. You can go to it if you want to. And so, because we're afraid of relying heavily on digital experiences, we make it ancillary, we make it tangential, we make it, we deprioritize it in the way we speak about it and the way that we present it.
Todd Kirk:So one thing that's important is you need to think if my goal is first not to train but to reach a user and make them aware of what's possible, well then that has to be in a process. So you got to be proactive and you've got to communicate about training and resources at the right time when the customer cares. So that's the first thing. The second thing is you got to focus on why as well as how. So we tend to focus really heavily on the why in the sales process, and then the CSM oftentimes is identifying a new why, because it either wasn't translated well for the customer or we realized that what sells and what renews are different. That tends to be a common advantage as well, and so what we don't do is actually build our education around the idea that helps the user unlock the value of the software for themselves. So we instead focus on go to this menu, click this button, add this field, do whatever right, we focus on just the tactical usage of the product, but we haven't connected the dots for the user on how it helps them unlock their why. So those are a few things that I think are important.
Todd Kirk:First, if you really want to make sure that people don't deprioritize your program, you need to think about reach and you need to work it into a process rather than have it be ancillary. You have to have a quality experience that doesn't just focus on how, but it also focuses on the why, and it helps connect that and not just why, because then it turns into a sales program. It actually has to connect the why to the how that's probably a better way to say that and then ultimately, it has to empower the customer to succeed and show that it's having an impact and if you can do those four things, you're on the right track to actually having a real impact and keeping a program around. It's just, again, a lot of people don't know how to tie those four things together, so it's easy to discard something.
Todd Kirk:Maria Manning Chapman, who is the chief researcher VP at TSIA for education services, and one of the things that she told us that I really love is that too often training is viewed as a program and not as a product, and that's another way to think about it. If you want to have a product of training, it needs to do those four things right. It needs to be part of a process, it has to be exactly what the user needs, it has to empower them, get the result, and it has to be able to, and you have to be able to show it. You can do those four things you've productized, otherwise you're just this program and programs are expendable, so that was a really long rant, I'm sorry, kristen.
Kristen Hayer:No, I can tell you're passionate about it and those are really good, I think, very practical things that you know CS leaders can take to heart and start to think about.
Kristen Hayer:And you know, I mean, I think that challenge that we all run into and we're seeing this across the board in CS budgets are getting cut and that's been happening for a few years and I think I see it most when CS teams have not been good at proving the value they're bringing to the organization. And yet, in light of everything going on and the somewhat chaos in our economy and world right now, I think budgets are going to continue to be challenged pretty hard. So there's going to be leaders who want something like your tool to build out, you know training for their customers and aren't going to be able to get the budget. Is there sort of a simple way to get going with this concept for clients without you know having to have a tool, or is there a way that they can start going in the right direction before they're able to get a tool in place, like what are some scrappy ways people can start to get going on this?
Casey Trujillo:I think so. So I'll make a quick comment and you know, todd, please, please, pile on. The first one I would do is look at your onboarding experience. So most onboarding is done completely with a person, and that's very expensive, and so you bring on 60 new clients in a month. Your capacity for one person to have those calls maybe you can handle 30 of them. So you're like, oh great, we got to go hire another implementation person, right? So what I would do is you probably have some digital resources right now. So what I would do is you probably have some digital resources right now.
Casey Trujillo:Take two or three of them that are most impactful, string them together into one course or one YouTube channel and, as soon as that person signs up, send a communication to them and say, hey, glad you bought. Here's the first education I want you to look at. I'll follow up in several days to schedule our kickoff call, but please review this first. I'll follow up in several days to schedule our kickoff call, but please review this first. Just start there and then track on a piece of paper that you sent that to the person. When you start the call, say, hey, did you watch it? Check, mark it again and then track how much time you spend with that person and the quality of conversation, and just do that for 30 days and start to see the impact that that's gonna make.
Casey Trujillo:If you're someone that's ahead of CS, try to do the same thing. What we normally do is we send an email and it has 24 different links in it. Here's who you call for support. Here's what you do for education. Here's what you do for blah blah, blah, blah blah, and then that is a massive pet peeve of mine.
Kristen Hayer:Those welcome emails are ridiculous.
Casey Trujillo:Yes, analysis, paralysis. Again, the marketing, your marketing team, would tell you you put one call to action in an email. That just it's just been proven over and over again. But we don't follow that right. We get that bell of forgetfulness again.
Casey Trujillo:I would say scrappy way, start with one thing lead out with digital, hold your horses. Don't immediately set the kickoff call. Just see, if you gave them three days and told them that's the first thing you wanted to do, if they would go do it and then measure the impact in 30 days. That's one of the things we always tell people to do. Let's A-B test this. You know, if you're going to use a solution, let's A-B test it. And they immediately see wow, our team took half the time to get this person on onboarded. This person didn't even call, call us. They said, hey, we're good, we got it all set up. They got curious because we met them with what they wanted, that they actually, like you, said, kristen, when you're working with that project management, they went in and started looking at other education because you gave me what I needed at the time. So that would be my first scrappy way to do it. I don't know, todd, if you have another one.
Todd Kirk:Yeah, I love all that and so, yes, stamp of approval on Casey there. The other thing that I would say, though, that is important, is that a lot of times, when we think about digital education especially, we seem to think that it has to be exhaustive, it has to be comprehensive, and that just flat out isn't true. So one of the things that is really important is to actually try to shrink it as best you can. So one of the things that's really fascinating, for me at least, is that I would say that the amount of digital content in hours that would take a user to, say, watch a video, is usually going to be a lot shorter than whatever. The live version of that would be probably in the realm of 20% the length. So if it took you five hours before, you probably only need one hour of content or that same period, and even one hour is probably a little bit too much.
Todd Kirk:So what I like to do is say if you're gonna build something, don't try to like boil the ocean. Have every single piece of every single scenario that could ever happen covered. Focus on how do I take that first experience that I need to have that user go through and have it be really, really good and ideally have them take less than 15 minutes to consume, which, if you're following my rule of 90 second videos, means you're 20 minutes of content max, maybe 10 videos to get started. So, like, just shrink it, make it as small as possible so that it doesn't feel like it's going to be this giant, burden, burdensome thing. We tend to invest in education through the perception of I need to have a giant house that I can fill with furniture, when really all you need is a backpack so that you can go out into the wilderness. Right, you're not trying to furnish a mansion, you're trying to get the customer to explore with a backpack. So I just thought of that analogy on the fly. So hopefully it's good, I don't know it's good, I like it.
Kristen Hayer:Oh, my gosh, all right. Last question. I'm going to give you each one minute to answer this one. What is the biggest trend in Customer Success right now, and why from your perspective?
Casey Trujillo:Tech touch. That's the one I'm hearing the most. People are saying, hey, because we don't have enough CSMs, we're going to have one CSM. All they do is manage this through digital education and we're going to see if we can do ARR that is 15K or lower, and that's what they're going to do. That's the one I'm seeing the most of is because CS don't have as much resources. They're putting CS people to the very strategic ones, like we cannot lose these renewals, and they're hiring the amount and kind of rolling the dice a little bit of saying, hey, can we get away not having a CS with this size of account and testing that? I don't think that's actually again a bad thing.
Casey Trujillo:I remember Cisco telling me that they're now up to a hundred thousand in ARR. Now I know their software is different, but they started at 10 and over two years they've moved it up to a hundred because they really went through and started to say, okay, if I could have meaningful, scalable touches, what would they look like and what would be impactful? They surveyed their customers and they found out that they wanted just these things and that was it. And they just keep on hiring it up. And but what's been more impactful is the CS. People can now be more strategic with the accounts they have because they're in a more manageable way to do the relationships. So that would be the one I'm seeing the biggest trend in.
Kristen Hayer:Okay, cool Todd.
Todd Kirk:Yeah, so the idea of trying to digitize more and more of the low level activities so that CSMs can focus on higher value activities is definitely a trend I'm seeing. I would add to that that it's one of the things that has always been challenging is a CSM is a pretty expensive resource. I mean, imagine if you're a SaaS company and you're spending 10% of your top line revenue on headcount for CSMs, which is not an uncommon metric, by the way. If you're under that, you're pretty efficient, but not everybody is. So the interesting part there is, if you're spending this massive amount of dollars on your CSM team and all they're doing is providing training, then that is a big miss.
Todd Kirk:So one of the things that I'm also seeing is there's a trend to redefine what the value and the activity of a CSM actually should be, and how are they driving the result for the business, and so it's also important, if you're in a CSM role, to be thinking about how am I impacting the business and can I tie to that?
Todd Kirk:Because so many CSMs today can't really show the impact that they're having, and that puts you at a risk of being a nice to have. That's gonna get chopped off. So the other piece of that is, if you're going to make sure that you're going to be successful, realize that organizations are trying to figure out how to scale, but that doesn't mean that they should be losing the human touch. The human touch is awesome, but it should be the right type of experience for the customer and make sure that when you are being brought in, you're doing the right thing. So that's the only thing I would add. Yeah, I totally see that. Move towards digital, but where CSMs are going to stick around the long term is where they try to redefine their job from just being like an on-demand support person for the customer, exactly.
Kristen Hayer:Well, Casey and Todd, thank you so much for joining me today on the podcast and talking about the importance of customer education. I think it's a really great topic and our field is still surprisingly relatively new to it, so I love all of your ideas. I know the audience will really appreciate the tactical suggestions that you had too, if someone wanted to get in touch with you.
Casey Trujillo:what's the best way for them to reach out? Linkedin? Yeah, casey Trujillo. Linkedin follow. I'd love to make a connection.
Todd Kirk:Yes, agreed, LinkedIn is a great place. Please come and find me. Casey and I also run our own podcast called SaaS Therapy, so people can come and check that out. We love to have that's a fun podcast.
Kristen Hayer:You guys should all check it out.
Todd Kirk:We get to talk about all kinds of cool ideas and think through this.
Casey Trujillo:Come listen to Kristen. Yeah, she's on our episode.
Kristen Hayer:Yeah, I got to be a guest. It was pretty fun conversation so well. Thanks again, guys. I also want to thank our producer, Russell Bourne, and our audio experts at Auraform Audio. This podcast is a production of Success League Radio. To learn more about The Success League's consulting and training offerings, please visit our website, thesuccessleagueio. For more great customer success content. Follow The Success League on LinkedIn or sign up for our newsletter. You can subscribe to Success League Radio on Apple, google, amazon, anywhere else you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening and we hope you'll join us next time.