At the other end of the spectrum are much more mature behaviors. At Asana, it might be creating a portfolio with a certain number of projects inside and inviting a dozen collaborators. At Twitter it could be creating lists, scheduling tweets, having 100,000 followers, or tweeting five times each day. At Caterpillar, it might be performing complex maneuvers with an excavator. Once you decide how to differentiate a novice from a master, you can then follow the relationship between their level of expertise and how deeply they've engaged with your educational content.
Goal 5: Lead Your Market Category
If your organization's main goal is to generate demand by becoming an established thought or industry leader, that's an important goal to get aligned with. Often, creating this kind of content will come from taking a step back from the product to talk to your customers about what they need to understand to do their jobs better. If you have a cybersecurity product, for example, it's great to teach your users how to set up policies and rules using the software, but it's more impactful to help them gain buy-in on a cybersecurity policy, give advice on how to protect and secure remote teams, or how to “shift left” to make developers' lives easier. If you can help them overcome these real challenges that they face day-to-day, you're well on your way to being a thought or industry leader.
If you do thought leadership right, you're publishing agnostic information that's focused on the job rather than the tool. Your users will begin to associate their job with your product, creating strong associations between the two (similar to how HubSpot is synonymous with inbound marketing). As a result, when users buy your product, they also feel that they're getting both product and also industry expertise; that is, your customers will believe they're gaining a partner who can help them achieve success in their job.
Make Marketing Your New Best Friend
“Hey, that's marketing's job, not ours!”
Sure, you might well have a whole marketing team focused on creating top-of-the-funnel thought leadership content, and that's great. Our advice to you is, get involved! Look at your team as learning experience designers. You are a group of subject matter experts in the industry, and you have a lot to offer thought leadership. You might even be the best team to drive thought leadership by creating actionable resources that help marketing to do their job.
Being effective is not about separating out which role belongs to whom; it's about making sure that education is part of the larger business conversation, wherever it happens.
Made to Measure: How Can You Track Your Market Leadership?
As we've said before, start with the low-hanging fruit. The easy metrics, like webinar registrations and e-book downloads, can show growth. Once you have those in place, look further afield to search results or organic search hits, items that show people are thinking about your brand. Take a look at your social media activity: not only followers, but also mentions and interactions, and track what content leads to a boost in numbers. Over time, you can also track more big-ticket items, like speaking engagements, analyst mentions, awards, or mentions in industry publications and review sites.
Adam Avramescu is a leader in the customer education field and author of Customer Education: How Smart Companies Profit by Making Customers Smarter. Below, he reflects on how he has defined the goals of customer education in programs he has led.
Thoughts from … Adam Avramescu, Customer Education Leader and Host of CELab Podcast
If I think back, the goals for customer education have been different at every organization in which I've worked, and that's influenced how I've built each program. Typically, when I first come into an organization, there may not be explicit goals laid out, but there is usually some kind of initial need; something going on in their business that makes the company want to invest in customer education. The first thing I do, even when I'm interviewing for the role, is figure out what stage the company is at, and ask questions about what they are trying to achieve. What's the customer's “job to be done” and what are the pain points that are stopping them from achieving that? Where do the product's capabilities intersect with that customer goal?
I also ask about wider business goals. What growth targets is the company trying to achieve? What product-market fit do they have? Internally, what is the company currently doing ad hoc or reactively that they could be doing in a more defined or organized way? I build out my goals for customer education from there.
For example, when I started at Optimizely, a company deeply focused on experimentation and digital optimization, customer education was a new concept for the company, but the rationale for investing in customer education was to help our CSMs and support agents become more effective, and to scale the work they were doing one-on-one with clients. They had a lot of support reps who were working inefficiently, re-creating the wheel time and time again. Our early customers, who had used A/B testing and optimization products before, knew fairly intuitively how to use our product. But as we grew, customers who hadn't used a product like ours needed a lot of hand-holding to get to meaningful use of the product. Because our CSMs couldn't scale support, a lot of customers weren't getting to that meaningful value. They didn't know how to structure meaningful A/B tests, or how to interpret the results of the ones they did run. It's not surprising that this resulted in a lot of churn. This wasn't unique to Optimizely; I commonly see companies decide to start a customer education program with a goal to reduce the manual or repetitive effort for CSMs delivering training and support.
I've found that executive goals are likely to be more strategic rather than process-based, and it's important to get a sense of that, too. I like to ask about this when I first meet executives: What are your company-level goals? What initiatives does the company want to drive? At Optimizely, when I joined, we were fighting what they called a “war on Gold churn,” trying to retain self-serve “Gold Plan” customers paying $499 a month, who were churning because they failed to get value from our product. It was important to help these customers be successful, but deeply unprofitable to provide dedicated support and account management to each of them. Revisiting company-level goals over time is important: as Optimizely grew and moved upmarket, our goals and priorities changed. Years in, retaining self-service customers was no longer as high on the list of business priorities, and so our customer education goals needed to evolve to suit.
In retrospect, I probably should have asked more of these kinds of questions in my early days at Optimizely. When my leaders set out priorities for me and my team, they often asked for it in terms of tangible content like creating a webinar series or fixing a knowledge base, and with a background in instructional design it was easy for me to focus on content and learner experience without explicitly thinking about aligning with the company goals. I could have saved a lot of time and made fewer mistakes if I'd had the mindset I have now, and had looked for that bigger business problem.
At Checkr, where I worked after Optimizely, it was a very different story. I was more mature as a customer education leader, so I knew what questions to ask. But the actual product – background check software – was different, and the motivations for customer education were new for me. While background checks are usually seen as a way to “keep people out” of jobs, Checkr has a mission to “build a better future by making hiring fairer.” As a result, a large part of my role was to educate clients on how to evaluate their candidates more fairly, and to balance their trust and safety goals with their compliance obligations. This, again, is an example of how your education program should highlight the intersection where the product meets a real customer need.
At Slack – different company, different product, different goals once again – they already had millions of users when I started. They had a successful
