Episode Transcript
Will: Shannon, welcome to the show.
Shannon: Thanks for having me, Will. I'm excited to be here.
Will: Before we get into the show, I hear you've got some exciting new news. Maybe you want to share that with us?
Shannon: Yeah, I just started a new role as the director of customer and content marketing at Intellum, which is an education platform.
Will: Awesome. Maybe tell us a little more about that role. What is that going to entail?
Shannon: That will entail all kinds of content marketing - social, website content like blog content, resources, templates, working with our education team. We have a great education team in-house, field marketing and events, and then all things customer. A big goal for this year is to highlight our customers more and share their stories, highlight their voices in the content we're producing.
Will: Wonderful. For our listeners who don't know about Intellum, is there anything more you can share about the company? I know you're new, but maybe a bit of an overview?
Shannon: Intellum is an education platform for employee education. So if you have internal learning and development, partner education, if you have reseller networks, partner networks that are selling on your behalf and doing product training, sales training, and then also customer education. If you're running a formal customer education program, doing curriculum courses, certifications, eLearning, VILT, ILT Learning - basically all things learning. We facilitate that. It's a perfect fit. I've actually been writing for Intellum for a while and obviously been involved in the customer education community. So it was kind of perfect role, perfect fit, perfect time.
Will: Well, that sounds really exciting. We'll have to keep our eyes on what's coming out of the content there as you're now running that show.
Shannon: I wish I could leak something that's coming out very soon. It'll be a behind the scenes of a very cool customer education initiative and program launch. But stay tuned.
Will: Very cool. I will stay tuned for that for sure. Today we're here to talk about customer education, which obviously makes this a really nice tie in. I know you have a lot of experience around customer education. Maybe give us a little background on yourself - how did you get into customer education and what's your experience with it been?
Shannon: Sure. I kind of stumbled into marketing first. I went to health coaching school and people were just asking me to build their websites and write their blogs and do their emails and just all kinds of stuff. I think they saw young person, you must do all the tech things, which I think is really funny. But I was young and needed money and I had a willingness to figure it out.
I ended up working for that school doing curriculum development. That was my introduction to education, creating curriculum there and teaching as part of their programs. Then I moved into the SaaS space doing more content marketing. Ended up as the product manager on a learning product, so kind of on the other side - the technical building of a learning management platform. Looking at how do we facilitate courses, certifications, how do we reward people and recognize people as they're advancing through their education.
Will: That is an amazing journey going through marketing, product and education development. I can definitely see why Intellum was happy to have you on board. Having that perspective of both being on the product side as well as on the content and curriculum creation side must be a rather unique perspective when you're interacting with other companies. What kind of light bulb moments did that allow you to have in this space?
Shannon: I know you and I have talked about this before - the advice I give to people is learn product management. Take a course in it. You don't even have to do it. But so many of those product principles, whether you're in customer education, customer marketing, marketing in general, understanding how your product team operates just makes you a better partner. If we understand how other people connected to our work do their work, we can better work together.
One of the things we talk about at Intellum is education is a product. You can sell trainings and course offerings, but you can also think about the development of education as a product. Everybody loves HubSpot Academy - they started as a series of webinars, that was their V1, like MVP education, just trying it out in the market. Are people responding to this? And then building it out over time.
I think that idea of an MVP, of iterating over time, of not needing to know what all it is today but having a vision for the future and starting to test ship and iterate - that's a big lesson that product helped me with in marketing and building educational materials.
Will: I think that's a very important point you're making there. Going back to that HubSpot example, because I think many people definitely hold HubSpot up as kind of a standard of education. I think many of us have got stuck in that trap of saying "I've got to do all of this" and wondering how many millions of dollars and sleepless nights we're going to go through to get this thing done. When you say that approach of MVP and iterate, if I'm staring at HubSpot thinking wow, this is what I want to be - is there a concrete first step you would recommend to start a company on this educational program journey?
Shannon: That's a great question and I feel like the typical marketing response of "it depends." I don't know that there is one tried and true path. It would be really great if we could say start here, go to here, go to here. But I really think it depends on your business and the current business goals.
At my last company there was definitely a need for on-demand learning, but the most immediate need was for live real-time training - one-on-one training and group training. So that was the education focus before they could move into more scalable learning. I think it also depends on where your business is at because it actually takes more time to build scalable on-demand learning than it does to do instructor-led or group trainings.
I think it really just depends on what your business needs are and what resources you have available. But start with figuring out what is the business problem that needs to be solved. Where's the learning gap? Because not every business problem is solved by learning. Sometimes it's not an education problem, it's a product problem, it's a service problem. Could be an internal training problem.
Will: Is there a company maturity or size or any kind of indication where you'd say now is or isn't the time to consider education as a viable solution?
Shannon: I would love to say education is always necessary. In the early days, I think we forget that maybe you have a CSM or an implementation manager implementing and training people on a product - that's education. It's just not scalable, and we're just doing it kind of ad hoc and more reactively as we go along.
I think what it really comes down to is do you have the resources and buy-in for it at the company level. There's a lot of really talented education people out there doing technical and support documentation or building courses or creating how-to videos for product releases. But it's really, does the company have the resources for it? Are they committed to it right now where it can actually survive?
I would hate to tell everybody you should totally have an education function and then put people in an environment where there's not enough buy-in for them to really thrive. You've got to have a leadership team who understands the value of education.
Will: I guess one of the things I'm always interested in is what are the mistakes and pitfalls that people run into when they go after these kinds of programs. I'm the kind of person that typically has to run into a ditch to know there's a ditch there. Doesn't matter that I could see it, but maybe we can help some people avoid some of those pitfalls.
Shannon: Sure. The first one I see a lot is not enough internal marketing. People will be building something great and getting great feedback from customers and driving great results, but they're not really talking about it internally. I think there is some element of needing to beat the drum and be a little out there about what you're doing. That could also look like finding champions on other teams, people who are willing to lift you up and shout you out.
Another thing I see people run into is thinking about what success looks like. A lot of people with a learning background think about what success looks like for the learner, what does it look like for that person to meet an objective or establish a certain competency. But they're not always thinking about the business outcomes they're ultimately looking to drive. How do we show that when people complete certifications they're more likely to retain or expand or participate in advocacy opportunities?
And that maybe leads to pitfall number three - data problems. Your data may not all be syncing. That's pretty normal for almost any tech company now - you've got a number of disparate platforms, not all the data syncing across platforms. Customer education people often have a difficult time showing and proving the value because they've got information in their learning management system, but maybe not connected to their CRM or customer success tool. So they're not really seeing the full picture.
Will: I want to dig into the data problems, but I want to step back a little bit to that internal marketing piece as well. This understanding of internal marketing is something we hear about in conversations around customer marketing, advocacy marketing, all sorts of things. But it still seems to be a problem people are facing. Do you think there's a reason why that problem still exists? And any tips and tricks for someone who maybe is struggling to get that internal marketing being heard?
Shannon: Why is it happening? Sometimes we deprioritize it. We focus so much on our communication with customers or prospects that we're not really thinking internally. People can do the same thing with education - they're educating their partners and customers, and internal people don't get that same enablement. Sometimes it's a "shoemaker's children with no shoes" type situation. It can also be a confidence thing or we feel weird being out there and promoting ourselves.
But I think we have to remember if you're a marketer, you know that people don't read everything you write. They don't read every social media post, they don't open every email. That's the same thing internally - we think we're being annoying, but we're not.
When I was building that learning product, we had a weekly update to our executive team. We called it "Learn in Two" because our product was Learn. We just did a quick 2-minute update of highlights from the week, progress made, and what's coming up next week. I would pull in different props, usually my cat, just to get people to watch. And then I'd have a bullet point recap - maybe you don't want to watch the video, but you'll skim through the bullet points.
Will: If we go back to the data you're talking about - it's so easy to say "I'm a data-driven marketer," it's so easy to want to be data-driven. But once you actually get into the pipes and mechanics of the data, it can become really hard to get definitive data. If I'm in an organization where I don't have a dedicated team of data analysts or scientists working for me, or really anyone, I might be the only person running this data. Any tips for how to start that data journey along with your educational programs?
Shannon: Yeah, I think most people probably just need to hear that that's pretty normal. Not every company has dedicated data resources. And especially when you're spinning up a new function, you don't always get those allocated resources, even if your company does have them.
I think we need to get comfortable getting into different systems. In customer marketing and customer education, I want to know who our customers are and what they're doing in the product. What parts are they using? How frequently? What are the most and least used parts? I want visibility into what's happening because that's going to feed my programs and strategy.
At my last company, we had an enablement resource and I was able to show that 46% of our accounts had used or accessed this enablement resource. Someone said, "well, how did you do that?" Well, I exported 25 spreadsheets from this one platform and I exported a list of our customers and then I went through and de-duped and looked at how many are there compared to the other ones.
Will: Yeah, I think that is some really solid advice. I think sometimes we have this ability to think about the golden end of the rainbow. We have an idea of what it should be like and it can almost block us from just getting in there and making it happen. But I like how you're tying that data back to core business metrics - retention or revenues or upsells - something that's going to help get the attention of the company. It's all well and good that a hundred people have completed our training, but if those hundred people will never work with us and didn't pay for the training, not particularly useful.
Shannon: Maybe another thing that's helpful too when thinking about data is actually just starting with the question - are people who are certified more likely to renew, more likely to expand, are they more likely to participate in advocacy activities? And then you can look at what datasets you need to pull to prove whether that's true or not.
Will: Yeah, it's interesting. I've had the misfortune to build multiple analytics dashboards and views. And that advice, just so everyone hears it, is so important - to start with the question. It's so easy for us to say "I need the data" and before you know it, you've got someone who maybe you do have a data team, and they're trying to display this data in every way they can think of, but they don't understand the core question or problem.
Now, one of the things you talked about, and this is what data leads us to - we get in there and learn what's happening, what's affecting what, and then we evolve the educational program. You mentioned earlier about starting small. When I'm evolving that program and trying to get it to that dream state, any tips or tricks for how to keep the momentum going?
Shannon: I think you want to take some time to assess what's currently happening and then what your business needs, and start to look at a roadmap of what that looks like over time and where we ultimately want to get to. How do we chart our way there? If you're developing a product, maybe you have this vision and you're releasing this first iteration, then building on it over time.
In terms of keeping the momentum going, I think it's just constantly reinforcing the vision, the mission of what we're trying to do, and stories. Before I knew what customer marketing was, it just made sense to me to tell students' stories to my team. When I was doing curriculum development, I was meeting students from all over the world and they were telling me about how the program changed their life or their clients' lives. I would bring those things back to my team and say, look, whether you wrote a landing page or were involved in curriculum development, you were part of that.
Will: No, I like that. I think sharing stories is always powerful, but bringing that in and really trying to understand the impact - we realize that wins are so important and how they're connected. Changing gears a tiny bit - what do you think the future of customer education looks like?
Shannon: I have hope for the future of education and then what I think very practically we need to be thinking about. My hope is just an elevation of it, that more people are starting to see and recognize the value. We're seeing more of those VP and CCLO type titles, which is awesome.
Where I think we're going is incorporating more social learning. I think we all know that we are inherently social beings, that we learn best socially. So I could be going through the digital advocacy certification, and that's one level of learning. But then if I could hop on the phone with you and have a conversation and say, "hey, I was reading this and it reminded me of this thing over here" or "I was thinking this is how I might apply it at work" - we're bouncing ideas around. This really helps to solidify our learning and then apply it.
Will: I often find that companies can be a little bit concerned about bringing customers together. They think there's a lot of work to it or something like that. Any views on how you would rapidly facilitate that social learning?
Shannon: It could be, depending on the platform you're using, how you're administering your learning, there could be a social element in there. When I worked for this online school, we had Facebook groups. That's maybe not what we would do now, but that was how we encouraged people to engage around different modules. It could even be spinning up roundtables and just encouraging people to get together in real time to talk about things.
Will: I just love personally that kind of story where I think we all believe that everyone else has their stuff together and we're the ones who are just trying to figure it out. And it's like when someone can just be like, "hey, I've been there." Not only have I been there, it was yesterday.
Shannon: Yeah, I find myself more often than probably anything else just telling people this is normal, very normal. Even at very large companies that do have their stuff together in a lot of ways. Very normal. Whether it's data platforms not syncing to each other, just all very normal.
Will: Before we break here, I just want to ask - if there's only one thing that a listener was going to take away from today's show, what do you think is the key point around education programs today?
Shannon: I think I just want to say get started. Find a place to start. Don't worry about doing the perfect thing or building the perfect thing. You'll grow it over time. And be okay with that - it doesn't have to be HubSpot Academy today. You don't have to have everything perfect, but just start with something because you'll learn from it. Really what we're trying to do is just help people. I don't want to withhold help because I'm waiting for the perfect solution. I think most people would rather have something than nothing.
Will: I like it. Just start, just make it happen. It's kind of a message after my own heart. If people wanted to connect with you, want to learn more after the show, what would be the best way for them to find you?
Shannon: Definitely LinkedIn. Find me Shannon Lagasse Howard on LinkedIn.
Will: Okay, wonderful. We'll share that out as well to make it easier for people to find you. Shannon, just thank you so much for your time here today. I think it's been a great conversation for myself and for our listeners.
Shannon: Yeah, thanks for having me. This was very fun.
