how important it is not only to know the customer but also to educate them. This evolution has been accelerated with drivers from three directions.
1 The increasing complexity of today's products. Today, customers need more hand-holding than ever to get to the point of value with your product. If you don't educate them on how they can reach that value quickly, they may assume that your product isn't a good fit or that it's too complex for their needs.
2 More competition than ever before. According to US Census data, new business formation has been growing steadily since 2010, and between 2019 and 2020, the number of new businesses registered leapt by 24 percent.1 A well-executed customer education strategy can make all the difference in helping your business stand out from the competition.
3 Growing customer expectations. Education and training have become an expected part of the customer experience. Whether it's in-product tutorials, skills-based learning, or certifications, your customers want to learn and grow as professionals and are increasingly looking to you to make it happen.
The Business Benefits of Education Across the Lifecycle
The focus on educating the customer may have started out as the route to customer success, but what began with an emphasis on improving customer experience has quickly proved itself to be an economic imperative, an approach that pays dividends across the customer lifecycle.
Pre-sale
The concept of an Educated Qualified Lead (EQL) is simple – a lead that is already knowledgeable about your product and what it can do for them before they reach out to show curiosity or interest. By educating the market, generating leads becomes easier, and the quality of those leads is much improved, with many ready to move into the second phase of the sales cycle even before they reach out. These inbound prospects that come through your door already have some idea of what gap you can fill for them, and therefore they can ask better questions and already have a foundation for learning.
Your interested customers have now become true prospects, and at this stage you might be channeling them into some kind of trial. Customer education offers a route to optimizing trials for success by focusing on the value proposition and controlling the flow of information so that customers don't feel overwhelmed. Examples might include offering the customer a tool to learn new vocabulary at the start, using visual aids to shape thinking, or breaking down the trial into smaller sections where customers can really kick the tires. The trial stage is a really sensitive moment in the customer journey, and customer education allows you to curate experiences that work for individual personas and roles. You can also extend the benefits of education to your channel partners, from distributors to resellers. The quicker and easier you can get these important stakeholders trained and confident with your product, the more likely that they will achieve results on your behalf and the less you will need to micromanage those relationships behind the scenes.
Education also allows you to scale and streamline your trial and onboarding processes far beyond what you could achieve with customer success managers (CSMs) and sales teams alone. If your prospects can walk themselves through a trial experience or an onboarding journey, complete with tutorials and education built for any points of friction, you are immediately reducing your customer acquisition costs (CAC) while increasing the number of simultaneous customers that you can onboard.
Post-sale
Congratulations! Your prospects have become customers. They've signed on the dotted line, onboarded your product, and passed the line into a post-sale relationship. But don't make the mistake of seeing that line as a finish line – in reality, it's more like your starting point. At this stage, marketing and sales often drop out of the relationship, and the baton is regularly passed over to customer support or customer success. Without a strong educational strategy in place for proactive support, CS teams can become a reactive presence, waiting for problems and troubleshooting as they occur.
While you can use your CSMs to train or support a single customer easily, once you hit a certain threshold, it becomes much more difficult to scale. How can a single CSM effectively manage training for many customers, all of whom will be at different stages of adoption with your product, and still have time to build relationships and drive value? Moreover, what happens when CSMs leave your organization and you haven't yet trained new ones to manage accounts? As your growth relies on deeper product adoption and customer satisfaction, you need a scalable path to customer onboarding so that they realize value as quickly as possible and can access the help they need on their own terms.
Customer education can be used to deflect support tickets and even turn support interactions into training interventions at the moment of need. Instead of onboarding new CSMs to handle an ever-increasing number of tickets, you can strategically place education where known pain points occur in your product, or you can develop a robust knowledge base so that customers can resolve their own problems. As customers become more confident that they will find the answers, your support costs drop, even as the number of customers you onboard increases.
Advocacy
Your customers are now achieving increasing levels of comfort and mastery with your product, and they're getting there faster than ever, speeding up overall time to value (TTV). Providing opportunities for customers to gain deeper mastery will lead to an increase in net promoter scores (NPS) and customer satisfaction (CSAT), because you're creating brand ambassadors who have used your product to become more effective in their role. The more legitimacy you gain in the market as an expert in your field, the more opportunities there are to grow direct revenues through paid education, such as courses and paid eLearning.
Today, skills-based learning and certifications are highly relevant and increasingly in demand. Customers are happy to pay for applicable and significant credentials that bolster their resume. Companies who can leverage this and create certifications that become known as the industry standard are carving out a competitive advantage, alongside a new line of revenue.
Crossing the Chasm: When Is the Right Time to Invest in Customer Education?
One of the first questions that you'll likely ask yourself is: When is the right time for your business to start investing in customer education?
To answer this question, we want to touch on the idea of the Technology Adoption Lifecycle by Geoffrey Moore, as seen in Figure 1.1.2
As your customers move through the lifecycle, they expect an increasing amount from your company. Innovators and early adopters, by nature, are likely to be more enthusiastic and self-motivated to learn and play with your product. On the business side, you have a lot more time on your hands at this stage to offer a white-glove experience when they need support. In contrast, as you cross the chasm into early-majority and late-majority adopters, your customers will start to expect more hand-holding and an established strategy for training them in how to be successful with your product. The profile of these kinds of customers dictates that they are going to be less comfortable or successful going it alone.
Figure 1.1 Crossing the Chasm
Conventionally, as companies
