Training to Retaining w/ Tom Studdert of Zoominfo

Okay, we're going to back up because that was just a mind blowing stat.

There's so much to unpack. There you go first, Ian. Go, go.

Just repeat the one piece that basically the 98.5%. Just so everybody hears that again. One more time.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Account Experience podcast. And today we welcome Tom Studdard to the show. Tom is the vice president of customer onboarding and implementations at ZoomInfo, and we have officially dubbed this episode Training to Retaining. We dive deep with Tom on how proper training and onboarding leads to higher retention rates. It's a fascinating episode and Tom brings the heat with some amazing retention stats and frameworks directly from ZoomInfo. You won't want to miss it.

So without further ado, let's dive on in.

I'm here as always with my co.

Host, Kerry T. Cell. Say hello, Cary.

Hello, everyone.

And today we have a special guest we are welcoming, Thomas Studdard.

He is the vice president of customer onboarding and implementations@ZoomInfo.

Welcome, Tom.

Thanks, Ian. Thanks, Kerry. Excited to be here with you.

Yeah, we're really excited. And Kerry, I know you have some previous experience with Tom. Why don't you get into that a little bit?

This is like a major geek out moment for me. As much as I love all of our guests and all of our topics, we're kind of jumping into a place that, as we've talked before, I'm very excited about. And you know, if a few months back, Tom and I actually were brave enough to do a debate with our partner Thought Industries at their event, Cognition. And the debate was fee versus free when it comes to education and training.

And so we're not going to.

There was no. Everyone won, so. Right. Right, Tom? Yeah, there was no clear cut winner. We all won out of that one. But I just going through the experience of setting up to do that with Tom and then actually doing it, I remember just thinking, wow, I really want to pick this guy's brain. He kept saying things that are like, he gets it, he gets it. And no offense, I mean, we keep struggling of trying to make education and.

Training and knowledge important.

And it was just so refreshing to be on a, you know, with somebody chatting, talking, debating, whatever we were. And just every time I talk to Tom, I always walk away thinking, yeah, he gets it. And I want to share. I'm so happy to be sharing that with Ian and with you guys. So that's my subtle way of saying I'm really excited to be here and have Tom, on the podcast, I definitely.

I was gonna say thanks, Gary. I'm gonna make sure that I put you in touch with my CEO next.

We'll send him a copy of it. Don't worry.

I definitely echo that sentiment. And we're going to label this session called Training to Retaining. I don't know who came up with that, but it's genius. I think it's probably Tom.

Yeah, it's on the back of a T shirt that we have for our team.

Love it, man. It's so good. So just a little background, guys. So Tom again works at ZoomInfo. So, Tom, just give us a day.

In the life of kind of what.

You do, training, onboarding, all that stuff. Just give us the overview.

So my role at ZoomInfo is really.

About helping our customers in the beginning of their life cycle. So whether that's 30, 60, 90 days, whatever that process might look like for the customer. I always say that onboarding is a process, not just an event, and so it's really based on the customer's needs. So my teams are going to help them through that initial process, getting them trained on our platform, as well as implementing any integrations that they might have. So if they're using Salesforce, if they purchase one of our solutions or emerging products, my team is going to help them get completely set up for that. And then beyond sort of the onboarding piece, my team is also responsible for customer education through the lifecycle of the customer. So sort of from the soup to nuts process. Right. So we're not just focused on the beginning. We're focused on the entire time that they're with us as a customer. So we're going to provide ongoing training, certifications, education around best practices, et cetera.

That's great. And I just want to throw this out there, Kerry. I'm not sure if you mentioned this, but we're actually customers of ZoomInfo, but we bought it when you gu were DiscoverOrg, and I was the person that ended up buying it, and I went through the onboarding process, the training with the sales teams and all of that, and it was. It was extremely well done. So I just want to throw that out there. Props to you guys. I think that was probably one of the better vendor onboarding processes we've ever had. So I think, again, just really, really great job, and I'm excited to get into this. So, Kerry, why don't you kick out the first question there, my man?

I've got a couple of different questions, but one of the ones I really wanted to ask first before you get to the heart, because again, what's hovering over this whole thing is the whole training equals retaining, which I love. Retention is at the heart of what we do also. But before that, how did you fall into this is my curiosity, Tom. Because none of us have a very straight path. We weren't six year olds on the playground going, when I grow up, I want to be an onboarding manager. I don't want to train people. It's.

So how did this come about?

How did you get to where you are now?

Yeah, it's a really interesting roadmap. So my background is in education. I got a degree in secondary education. From the time I was a child, I knew I wanted to be a teacher. All four of my parents had teaching degrees. My grandparents. I'm sorry, all four of my grandparents had teaching degrees. Both my parents have teaching degrees. My little brother has a teaching degree. So I come from this place of education was really important in our family. In college, changed gears a little bit and decided I wanted to go into higher education. And so went into the student services, student affairs work in higher education, ultimately ending as a dean of students at a university in Texas. And that was my pathway into sort of the sphere of education. In 2015, I connected with a former student of mine. His name is Henry Schuck and He is the CEO of ZoomInfo and what was then DiscoverOrg. And that was back when we had about 150 employees and it was just sort of serendipitous. He was starting an education team within DiscoverOrg at that time. I started as somebody in the HR side and I was looking to potentially leave higher education and think about a different type of role and different impact that I might be able to have. And lo and behold, worked it out. And although I started as the employee education person, within a couple months we combined employee education and customer education into one sphere. Cause there was a lot of crossover, especially at a smaller company at the time. And moved from higher education into corporate education. And the story has just sort of written itself from there and it's been a great experience. There's a lot of similarities between the two. Even though most people would probably say that higher education and corporate world are very different, there's a lot of similarities between what we do.

You went there, so I have to go there also because it's. I'm always amazed by our parallels in a lot of ways because I was. I wanted to be a teacher. Everyone kept saying, you'd be a great teacher. And I had A passion for that. But I'm in the corporate world kind of doing this. This real work to get paid kind of thing. And there were the parallels. And I found that the more that people were telling me they were different, the more similar they were. And there was that crossover. And so let me challenge you on that a little bit and just ask, so where do you see the similarities of education and in that realm with the corporate world? I mean, where is that crossover? Where are the similarities in that for you?

I think it's really at what we do at the core, right? It's the foundation of what education is.

Now.

There's never a moment in corporate education where I talk about the theoretical foundation of education or of learning, because that would tune out my customers. And I know for a fact it will tune out my CEO. He's even said many times like, I don't want to know about the theory, but at the end of the day, how we have built our education program for customers at ZoomInfo is based in learning and based on how people learn and based on sort of those theoretical constructs of learning. And when we did that, we sort of realized that this is not just throwing webinars at people. Right? Which is what I think people make a mistake at a lot when it comes to customer education is we'll do.

A webinar, they'll soak it up, they'll.

Learn it, and they'll be able to be successful. We broke that down much further into sort of how do people learn? Building sort of the scaffolding model. And that's where I think we've been successful. There's also the sort of the parallel to the world that I was in in higher education. I oversaw new student orientation at a university in California, and orientation and onboarding are almost identical. They are just different. It's just different terminology. What I did at orientation was getting students set up for success for the four years that they're going to be with us. As an undergraduate, what I do in customer onboarding and customer education is getting customers set up for success for the time that they're going to be with us as customers, which we hope will be four plus years. And it's just a matter of sort of shifting the language, shifting the terminology. But the core is still the same. The pathway is still the same. Now, certainly the way a freshman learns is very different than the way somebody who might be a CEO or a vice president, sales learners. But at the end of the day, the way in which we build our education programs is going to be the same.

Yeah, I just love that. And I think everyone's sick of hearing me say it, so that's the reason why I have you here. So they hear someone else say this. But onboarding an employee, onboarding a freshman in their, in their first experience in college, and onboarding a customer who's just bought your solution, your service is very, is much more similar than it is different. It's almost identical. At the end of the day, you want that customer to stay. You want that and be successful. You want the employee to do the same, you want the student to do the same. Growth is in there. Retention. This is, I think, where HR and corporate and education all kind of run together because I think our missions are all the same here. And some of the metrics actually will change the name of them, but they're pretty much the same also.

Right.

And it's funny that you actually use.

The term retention because obviously from a customer perspective, that's one of the big drivers of what we do, right? It's retention. Whether that's logo retention or net retention. That was the number one way in which I determined success when I was in higher education. Was, was the student retained from year to year? Did they ultimately persist towards graduation? That is the same exact terminology that I use today. It's just a different lens. And you're right, the terminology that I use now in terms of measuring our impact, you know, training equals retaining being sort of our goal. We don't talk about it from a training perspective in higher education, we just talk about it from a going to class perspective. If you go to class, you're going to ultimately do better, you're going to be retained. And similarly to customer world, the customer education world, the more training, the more learning that you do about our platform or whatever you're training individuals on, the more likely they are going to be successful. You know, it was always a dotted line between orientation and graduation in higher ed, and it's a dotted line between training and retention. There's a lot of things that happen in the middle of that, but at the end of the day you can distinguish that dotted line if you're doing it the right way.

So I'm really interested in this whole link between the training and retention. So what are like some in between steps? Are there like for example, data that shows that usage increases retention or anything like that? Is there anything you can kind of get into there?

Yeah, absolutely. So when the Customer Experience team first was formalized at what was then Discover. Org, my role was put into that team. And I remember thinking, oh, goodness gracious, like, how am I going to get that link from a dotted line to an ever more solid line? And really the way we did it was we drew a line between onboarding and education and usage of our platform. We have data that shows that our users who are trained almost double, almost use our platform at a double the rate and sometimes even more than that, depending on the type of training that they're taking. And then we can draw a direct line from usage to retention, which, you know is not rocket science.

Right.

It's the more somebody uses the platform, the more likely they are to be invested in it, the more likely they are to want to keep it in their tech stack. And so while it's hard to get the direct line from training over to retention, I can get an indirect or direct line to usage and then a direct line from usage to retention and therefore get the indirect line from training to retaining.

I love that. I mean, that's so important, especially for SaaS. I mean, everybody gets kind of focused at least on the people and the customers I've talked to, they're really focused on creating a great experience. But I think to your point, if you don't link it to something important like usage or retention, I think you lose kind of the end goal or the North Star metric. So. I'm so happy you brought that up, Kerry. I'm sure that's all over your roadmap because you've been focused on that for the last year and a half.

Yeah. And we'll share. Tom shared a slide with us and I don't know if you have it available, throw it up or not, but I loved it. It blew my mind when I was looking at just the types of training and how it accelerates the usage and the numbers behind that. But as educators. So let's step away for one second. But as educators, you sit in front of a group of people and you give them knowledge in all different formats. And we'll get to that in a second because that's my next big question. How do you tap in and how do you do that? But we give this stuff away thinking we're going to make them grow or better. And we don't always have a measurement. Sometimes we think it's a grade at the end of the semester or what college they go to or higher college or education. But in our world, ours is usage. At the end of the day, we're trying to get them to buy into what we think is adding value.

Right.

And it's Crazy how many companies just don't go back and tie the two. And I love that. Turning a dotted line to a forever solid line. I mean, just people don't do that. And again, it was another aha moment when I heard you speak, you know, a few months back, it's just like, all right, so tell me how you create that solid line. You know, so what, what are some of those vehicles you're using? How do you create a good training program?

What works?

Yeah, well, I think the first thing and we did this about, goodness gracious, about four and a half years ago is I got all the customer trainers that were ultimately going to report out to me, which at the time was.

Four, and we sat in a room.

For an entire day and we blew up the model and we said, what does our model need to look like? And when we did that, we recognized that when you just as I mentioned earlier, when you just do a webinar in the beginning of a customer's life cycle, you're not doing them justice and you're not doing yourself justice. And so the first thing to do is to really map out the customer experience, from soup to nuts, from onboarding to renewal, and then figure out where your education program fits in. And usually where it fits in and where it fit in for us was when we started to notice throughout the 12 months when usage would start to dip. The key metric for us was at day 90, we started to see customer data or the customer usage start to dip a little bit.

Then we saw it again around month.

Seven, and then we saw it again around month ten. And so what we did is we built in education interventions, to use a higher education term, love that. And we actually do a training at that moment. We contact the customer, we set up their next training as a part of onboarding. We automatically set up the first training or second training really at day 90. And then we do a combination of live webinars, private trainings, on demand trainings. We built a certification program that we strategically place in front of them at certain key moments based on when that usage was slipping. Another great example is, you know, back in the day when we used to be able to travel, we would go to customers and do on site trainings. And what we recognized was if we did an on site training for a customer three months prior to their renewal, we had a 98.5% chance of that customer renewal. We were doing on site trainings in the first three months because we were doing onboarding. The customers would say, come out and train us and so we backed away from that and said, no, it's not advantageous for you or for us to come in those first three months. It's advantageous for all of us to come a little bit later when you're having questions, struggles, when you don't know what's the next step with your relationship with ZoomInfo. And so we started to move those out later and what we saw is, okay, when we do this training here, their renewal, their retention is almost a guarantee as long as we built that program. And so for me, it's really about making sure you know your customers and every customer's or every, every company's gonna be a little different. But know your customer, know their life cycle and build your training as the interventions in there.

Okay, we're gonna back up. Cause that was a mind blowing stat.

There's so much to unpack there.

No, you go first, Ian.

Go, go.

Just repeat the one piece that basically the 98.5%. Just so everybody hears that again. There's one more time.

Yeah. So if when we do onsite trainings, meaning that when we go to a customer's headquarters or wherever they're located and do an in person training, if we did it in sort of the three months out from their renewal date, we had a 98.5% chance or 98.5% success rate in renewing that customer.

Wow, that's wild.

And as a result of that, I actually hired somebody who all she did was travel. The poor thing, like lived out of a suitcase. But it was figure out which accounts are perhaps in jeopardy, go find them, contact them and go to them. Like, even if they're not requesting us to come to them, we're going to make ourselves available. When she would go to Chicago, it's not just to hit one account, spend the week there and hit 50 accounts and get them all in. Because we know that that's going to have a greater impact than you on the phone here in Vancouver, Washington, doing a training over the phone.

Ian's already picking up the next podcast.

I am. I mean, that literally just blew my mind.

I'm going to back up a little bit further here because. Because what I'm kind of taking out of this is, and I think it's really important, instead of companies trying to force their customers into what they think is an education journey and path and what's good for them, truly looking at usage, behavior and creating a plan around that that enhances or improves that, because it's very. I think we're all the same. We all want to roll up this really big kickoff and have all this dynamic training at the beginning and really sell it to everybody. But what we really have is a bunch of people who are like, I'm not even sure if I really want to or not, where nine months into this, they've already had a chance. Their CEOs bought into it, he's talking about it. Maybe you got your users and managers and then you come in and go, okay, you guys have used it, some of you love it, some of you are unsure. Let me help train you up. But I love that because. Cause you're really taking the metrics of usage and behavior and building your training around that.

I remember very clearly when I first started a customer saying, and this was before we changed our model, was you guys built a training program for DiscoverOrg, not for me as the customer. And that was one of the guiding quotes in our conversation about rebuilding our program, was, no, it shouldn't be. For us, like, yes, at the end of the day, we do have to sort of work within our parameters, but at the end of the day, it's really about the customer's needs and looking at usage, looking at the lifecycle, looking at where in which we. Where we feel like we can plug in. That should drive how we design our program. And so we flipped it on its head a little bit. And I think that that's why we've seen such great results for our program.

So I think we agree the first year is key. It's vital. Right. To our success and retention. Because if that equation is going to work, training equals training to retaining. So the first timeframe you talked about was that three months. What's happening there that's causing a little bit of that dip?

Yeah, I think likely it's because, and.

We all know this, right? You have 80,000 things in your tech stack. You're trying to figure out what it is that you're using, especially if you're. If you're new. Adoption can sometimes be the hard piece. And so it's a matter of you get sort of into the. It's no longer the shiny new object in your tech stack. It's okay, well, this is going. Or it's perhaps happening in the background and it's not at the forefront, or something has come up or there's a pandemic that happens, whatever the case may be, and it's no longer at the forefront. And so we want to make sure that our solution is always at the forefront of what it is that the SDR@XYZ account is using. And so this is our opportunity to do that.

The other piece of it is customers.

Or our customers are constantly hiring new people. And particularly if it's an SDR team using Zoom info, they may have had turnover, they may have had a couple SDRs leave and they replace them with a couple new ones. And, and at that point, those new ones don't have the same level of learning that the previous ones had. And so it's another opportunity for us to not only reiterate and remind the current SCRs how to use it, but get the new ones back up into the fold and get them caught up and up to speed as quickly as possible so that it's never zoom in from, never falls to the back of their tech stack. It never falls to sort of the background in their mind. It's always a chance to remind them. Nope. This is part of how you hit your number every single day and then.

You then the next timeframe. So let me move forward in time a little bit. You said seven month was where you saw another little bit of a dip. So what's happening now? So you've, you kind of swooped in, you've kind of re. Energized a little bit, gave, you know, reminded them, hey, we want to be up front. What happens around seven months?

Yeah.

So what we found is that a couple things, One, similar situation to the onboarding, there's changeover, there's usage fatigue, there's a tech stat fatigue. So all of those same things still apply at month seven and even again at month 10. But what we found more as we moved along the journey is that is that there's sort of the conversations that are happening outside of education with Zoom info. So at that point, the account manager might be involved. There may be an upsell opportunity that's on the line. There may be health conversations. There may have been a product glitch that came up. There may have been a realization, oh, wait a minute, this isn't doing exactly the way I wanted it. So I figured out using a different piece of my tech stack, how to do it, when in reality we can do it. They just don't. They just, we haven't taught them that. And so it's, it's, that's when we start to see things sort of ebb and flow. There's a lot of factors that go into it, but at the end of the day, it's really about how the customer is using it and are they using it in a way that makes the most sense for them. And at month seven and month 10, that's when we start to see them sort of asking the question. I don't necessarily remember if this is the right way to do it. There's also memory fatigue. Right at the end of the day you're like, oh, I only use this system every other day and now I've forgotten how to do this particular feature also. And this goes all credit to our phenomenal engineering team. Our platform is pretty robust. There's a lot of things that are available to them and sometimes it can be overwhelming for folks. And so it's another opportunity for us to step in and bring it down to the level that they are at and where they want to to be successful.

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So I have one more time period to talk about then, because all that makes perfect sense. What about after that renewal? What about, we're going into year two and I'll talk crazy talk here. Year three and four, how does onboarding, training, educating the customer look in those additional years?

Yep. So our, you know, as you probably have figured out, having the higher education background, if you've gone through zoom info training, we have a one on one, a 102, a 201, pretty standard. Well, when they renew, we do a 401 and it's an opportunity for us to do a refresher, particularly for folks who are like, okay, I already went through onboarding, I've already gone through your training, I don't need anything more. It's like, nope, we're going to get you back on the hook one more time. And then at that point, what we've done is every three to four months we send an email to every end user at that account and say, okay, what are you still struggling with? What are the things that you want to do? What business goals may have changed for you? Are you changing your sales team structure or your methodology? And how do we fit into that? And so now it's an opportunity for the customer to say to us, this is the one thing that we need to understand. This is the one thing that we're missing. This is the one thing that we still need help with. And so rather than us leading the agenda at this point, now the customer really, really owns the agenda in years two, three and four. Also, we know from our uses or from our renewal statistics, just like in higher education, the hardest retention year is freshman and sophomore. The hardest retention year for customers is that first to second year. Once they renew at that second year, it is much, much more likely that they're going to stay with us as a long term customer. And so the education piece becomes more of, here's some best practices, here's education around a new feature or a new product that we've launched and less about the foundations, how to do the do.

If that makes sense, does Let me jump in here. So I'm really curious. So, okay, we know that training onboarding leads to usage, leads to retention, but let's go step below. Are there any other metrics that you guys look at? Because I'm a marketer so I'm always interested in these metrics. What else are you guys looking at along that journey with the customer?

Yeah, so we use a pyramid of metrics to measure what we do. And I'll be honest, when we first started as as a customer education unit, we were really only looking at that core basic metric. It's sort of synonymous to the Maslow's hierarchy. You've got to have the data, you've got to have the basic foundation. And that basic foundation was what we called our core metrics, was did they show up to training? Did they actually come? Can we check them off as an attendee and over time grow the number of accounts and end users that have been trained and then you build up from that. That second layer up is satisfaction metrics, NPS scores, CSAT scores, smile sheets, essentially. Did they like the training?

And we still do those.

Right. Third level up from that is engagement metrics. Are they engaging with the content and the curriculum that we've posted? Are they watching that video? Are they taking that E course? Are they doing the certification? Next up is those usage metrics that I talked about being able to make that linkage. But then sort of the golden triangle at the top of the pyramid is impact metrics. And that's the one that to this day we still struggle with. And I think that's the hardest, the self actualization of the Maslow's hierarchy. It's the hardest one to hit really.

Is are they doing the thing that.

You told them to do, the way in which you've told them to do in order to be successful? So in our platform a great example is we have advanced search. We can teach anybody how to do an advanced search. But are they doing the advanced search in the way that we've taught them how to do the advanced search that is the best way for their particular business and use case or are they just sort of hunting and pecking? You know, either one of those is going to qualify as a usage metric. They're in the platform, they're doing something, but are they doing it in the best way for their particular use case? That's when you know you've sort of won them over because then they're doing it in a way that makes sense for them. They're getting the results that they need. They're getting ROI from the platform.

Yeah. Wow. I'm going through the pyramid right now. And we have it. We're looking at it too, because, you know, when you're thinking about that impact, that top of that pyramid. So I guess my next question is, do you measure the impact it has on their business or the return, the roi, the return on that investment. Is that also something that your team dives into? And how do you do that?

Yes, we do. We do. So two ways. One, we certainly have automated business technology that allows us to. To determine whether or not customers are using the platform in the way that they're supposed to be using it or the way in which we've taught them how to use it. So certainly there's the sort of the more statistical analysis, the quantitative measures. But then because my team sits in the same group as our customer success or customer success managers, one of the things that we've done is through our customer life cycle, that we built our touch patterns, that we've hit our head of business intelligence. Would be so excited that I use the term touch pattern.

Because when he.

First launched it, I was like, what is a touch pattern?

But essentially, when we have our outreach.

Efforts to the customer and particularly to the buyer, we've built in questioning about how are you using the platform, how are you using these features? And we're collecting that information through our strategic business review calls, through our renewal conversations, whatever the case may be. We even have a post onboarding strategic call with them just to make sure, okay, you were taught this. Is this how your team is using it? We have random calls with our end users that my team coordinates that we work alongside of customer marketing to determine whether or not they're doing the thing in the way which we taught them.

So, yes, we're measuring ROI through automated.

Means, but we're also measuring it through sort of more qualitative comp conversations that we're having with our customers. And those two sort of impact metrics come together to help us hit that top of the pyramid. It's the most challenging by far because it's also super time consuming. But if we're not doing that, then why bother with the rest of this stuff?

Yeah, I love the customer calls, so that's something that I think a lot of people underestimate. As far as just getting a temperature check. I know that you can send surveys, you can do a bunch of different things, but sometimes a customer call will just give you so much more information than you just get them talking. And when you get them talking. You find out things that you get to the root cause a lot easier sometimes. But one other thing I wanted to ask you. So you mentioned one of your tiers was satisfaction metrics. We talk a lot about NPS on this podcast. So I'm kind of just curious. Can you give us, like, a, you know, a very brief crash course on how you utilize nps? Do you do it, like, transactionally at the onboarding stage? Just give us a quick kind of hit on that.

Yeah.

So we actually do NPS in apps. So question is the nps. One question is posed at certain key milestones within the customer life cycle. We do it at day 60. That's the first one that end users are sort of subjected to our NPS program. And that really is the quantitative metric that I look at as an onboarding nps. Now, certainly there's other things that have happened in this for 60 days, but that's the statistic that I really look at. Then we do it at day 90, day 180, day 270, day 360, sort of each sort of one fourth of their contract to determine whether or not it's fluctuating both at the customer level, but then also at sort of the. The global metric level as well. And so we're asking that question, and then we built in through our customer marketing teams, sort of the outreach cadence that happens based on the end user's response rate.

I like the fact that you identified like, that first one is like, well, I'm on the hook for this very first one. But you're still connected to the seasonal relationship, one that continues. And I love the fact that you're speaking the cadence. You know, I mean, Ian will back me on this. I think a few years back, we're like, well, one or two a year, but we really like. And now we're like, no, you gotta do it four times a year. What we do and how fast things move, and all it takes is someone to sneeze on the fourth floor, and all of a sudden your program's a wreck and you don't know it. And the seasonal is so important to.

Stay in touch with our customers in our worlds.

Yeah, I love hearing that team is actually comped on the MPES score the day 61.

Because again, while everything that we do.

Has the dotted line, that one's a little bit more solid than the ones that happen throughout the lifecycle. Because I can say, look, if they didn't have a good onboarding experience, we're gonna see it at the day 60 NPS. And to that, if they don't have a good onboarding experience, we're gonna see it in the future. NPSs too, because my boss always uses a hotel check in metaphor, which if he listens to this podcast. Yes, I'm using your hotel metaphor. You know, you, you check into a hotel, you always remember your hotel check in. If it's a good experience, then everything else sort of follows from there. But if it's a bad experience, no matter how good everything else is in your stay, you still go back to oh, that check in process was horrific. That's the same way we treat onboarding.

That reminds me of your world going through food and Bev. I mean that's very similar, I'm sure.

Well, it's, you know, in training people, whatever industry they're in, you have to stop and go, what's the first experience that customer has with you? And whether it's checking in but some hotel. And again, I stay in a lot of hotels. We all have, but sometimes it's not even the check in, it's parking in the parking lot or getting on the shuttle bus. And so I think it's a good analogy. But it keeps going further and further and further out. Now in our SaaS world, to me it's the website. Like if I land on a company's website or their email's agitating me already, I'm kind of like it's going to be rough where versus where someone kind of wins my heart over a little bit or does something special. I'm kind of like now I'm curious and I think this, we used to call it the point of, with the zero point, it's slipping my mind. But it was that point that you have your first opinion. And I think with social media, Internet, with all this stuff, it's going further and further out of when you get that first impression of that customer or that experience. And yeah, it's interesting when you get to that 60 day, I think that's the sweet spot. Right? It's all the metrics we're running now in implementation on my team is okay, at what point are they bought in.

What point did they grab the steering wheel and take off for themselves a little bit, but feel comfortable doing that. And all the numbers are hovering around 45 to 60 days in what we do.

Yep, I agree.

Well, and you know, to your analogy of, you know, sort of the parking lot and the shuttle, you know, I think to myself is if I have a good experience in all of those things, I'M good.

Right?

Like, there's no, like, wow factor. But if I have a bad experience, you bet I'm going to remember it for the rest of my time and I'm going to be agitated through my entire stay at that hotel.

And so similarly, if they have a.

Bad experience with our website or with our sales process or with onboarding, we're going to hear about it at day 360 when we're trying to finalize that renewal. Well, I remember your website didn't do this or your onboarding manager did this. So my goal is, you know, either get really good feedback or get no feedback at all because, you know, the people that are frustrated with the onboarding or the training process are going, are typically going to raise their hand, and if they do, then we're going to hear about it, you know, the rest of the time. So, you know, the old adage, you never have a. You only have one chance to make a first impression. And that's really true with customer onboarding and customer education.

Yeah. And I think let's shift gears here. So. And I know you guys are both involved in employee onboarding and employee experience and training, so I'm going to lead with Tom, but Kerry, feel free to pipe in. But how do you guys think they're similar and different?

Yeah.

So, you know, like I said, when I first started, it was then Discover. Org, I was the first person that ever saw employee onboarding, sort of more of a centralized effort. And I came in immediately following having done new student orientation work at the university level. And again, the comparison is really similar. You know, orientation hands off to professors to ensure success, customer education or employee onboarding hands off to their supervisors to ensure success. You know, from a similarity perspective, expectations are really high. As a new employee, you expect a certain level of onboarding and education when.

You first walk in the door.

Smoothness is key. You've gotta make sure that from an employee perspective that they know where to.

Park, that they know what the code.

Is to get in the front door, the elevator, whatever the case may be, having things prepared in advance. At new student orientation, we were very methodical in what we gave new students when they checked in. Similarly, for a new employee, having a schedule for them, them knowing what's going to happen every hour of their first couple of days, because there's nothing worse than sitting at your desk in a new job twiddling your thumbs and going.

I don't really know what to do.

You know, onboarding is that first experience, but it's everlasting and employee ongoing training and customer ongoing training should also happen.

It's.

And it's not just product training.

It's.

It's best practice training, it's professional development, it's professional expertise. It's allowing your employees to not just get training in zoom info, it's also giving them training in public speaking or training in leadership, whatever the case may be. And then finally, just like in employee education and employee training, or I'm sorry, just like in customer training, we do this in employee training. We evaluate it, we ask our employees.

Was it well done?

We look at success metrics, we look at retention. Did they stay with us? Did they stay employed?

They.

Did they do the thing that we.

Asked them to do?

You know, all those things are very similar.

Yes. No, no, no. Wholeheartedly as. But I'll take it from another slant too. And I always say this. Human beings are emotional, right? And I think a majority of our happiness, our satisfaction, our joy or our anger and frustration comes from that emotional peace. And I'll say this, if you blow it at the beginning, back to the analogy of the hotel, the same with an employee. That person will hold on to that forever. And I think of it this way. You get the best you'll ever gonna get from employee at two times the interview process. They'll never gonna be better than that. And day one, they're nervous, they're scared, and they're looking at you to say, you know what? You made the right choice and we made the right choice by picking you up. Let's take care of you. Let's get you caught up to history. Because nobody wants to feel like they don't know what the hell's going on or who we are. So that first day is really important. Let me teach you who we are and why we do this and what our roots are. So now I feel like I'm bought in. And then those other small things, Tom, that you said are so vital, I think big companies, CEOs sometimes forgetting, like, where do I park? Oh my God, where I got to go to the bathroom. How does this work? You know, do we eat here? Like no one's getting up for lunch. Is someone taking me to lunch or do I have to fend for myself kind of thing. It's. These are all the little things that the individual or companies worry about. And there's got to be that spirit of, let me put your mind at ease. You don't. You're not crazy for feeling this way. We're going to make you feel good. We're going to make you feel positive part of it. And I think a lot of companies miss this on day one with the employee and with the customer and emotionally. I tell people, I think turnover and employees and churn with customers start from the onboarding process from day one in the back of their mind, they file it and they go, oh, you blew it. I'm always going to have a little chip on my shoulder because of this and I'll never really truly champion it versus that employer, that customer that'll fight for you even when you're wrong. No, no, no. You got to understand where they're coming from. It's because you won their heart over. The emotional piece has been bought in. So I agree 100% with what you said, Tom. It's so vital that you have that journey map, those check ins. You take care of them from day one and you set them up for success.

Right. And Terry, I'm so glad you mentioned the lunch piece. That was one of my biggest things that when I first started at Zoom, Zoom Info or Discover Board was on day one, take the new person to lunch. Because that's the worst feeling on day one is I don't know what to do. I don't know whether or not I can go to lunch, do I eat in the break room or can I leave the facility? And I don't know anybody yet. And so we introduced a buddy program on that first day. And either it's the manager or it's somebody else in the team. You're responsible for making sure that, that you take them to lunch and the company paid for it. We'll take them to lunch. I mean, it's $15 for a burger, big deal, we can afford that. But it goes such a long way in making that person feel comfortable and making them feel invested. And it eases that tension right away of like, I don't know what to do. And you know, the I don't know what to do moments are the worst for a new employee is because they want to be impressive. They want to show that they got hired for the right reasons. And those are one of those moments where you sort of look around and go, am I going to get along with anybody? And do I know what I'm doing?

Yeah. I think the other thing I want to touch on is the smoothness. You mentioned smoothness as an adjective for that. And I think that's really important too is have a plan. And I mean, there's a ton of work that goes into planning these onboarding processes. Right. Like you said have a calendar where they have something planned every hour of the day, have a lunch plan with specific people. But to the newly onboarded employee, it should be feel very smooth. Right. It shouldn't feel super planned. It should feel very natural. And if that is the feeling they get, excuse me. I think you're successful in onboarding that employee.

Yeah, I agree.

And that relates to the customer, Ian, because let's bring it full circle back to where we started. But if the customer immediately comes and goes, oh, my God, look at all these things that I have to do versus, oh, this is pretty natural. This. Okay, this is what we're going to do. This is next. This is. Oh, you have a question. Let's park that in the parking lot. We've all used that term. We'll get to that. It's coming. Or let me send you some documentation. But right now, let's worry about where we're at. And I think smooth is a great word for it. Right. To kind of make it easy.

Yeah.

It also brings up what I said earlier, which is it's a process and it is our job as, as educators in the customer space to educate them about the process that it's, you know, you're not going to get everything on this first training, and that's okay. You know, I just had a customer email me on Friday saying your platform is like a Ferrari and I need to make sure that the training keeps up with that. And I said, here's the deal. Your first training, you're probably going to feel a little overwhelmed. A new employee your first day. I used to tell employees this. I did the opening remarks to new employees and I said, you're going to leave here today feeling like you drank from a fire hose. And I promise when you come back tomorrow, that spigot is going to turn back just a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more. And same with customer onboarding. That first presentation that we give you, there's a lot that you're feeling like we're giving to you. But guess what? We're going to do another one of these. You're going to have access to all of these videos and these on demand courses and the certification. And we're going to make sure that you get to, to the point where you feel confident whether you're an employee or a customer. And if we're not, raise your hand and say, hey, something's on fire. I need help. And we're going to jump in and we're going to help firefight that for you.

Well, there's one other point, and I know we're getting close to the end here. We've had you for a long time and we're so appreciative. But I do want you to, because you mentioned this when we were talking back on cognition, you brought this up, and I think it's so relevant. The opposite side of the spectrum. You know, it's these light bulb moments. And I think customers get them, our employees get them. Talk to us a little bit about these light bulb moments and how do you identify them? What do you do with them?

Yeah, for sure. So, like I said, I come from a long line of educators. My grandmother was actually my 5th grade teacher when I was a kid.

I know it's the only year I.

Got straight A's, but she used to tell me this. She said, you know, the, you know, she did it until she retired at the age of 65, you know, from the time she graduated from college. And I used to ask her, like, how do you do this same thing day over and day over and day over? And that goes to customer training. To my customer trainers, they host very similar training sessions seven, eight times a day. And what she told me and what I tell my team is look for.

The light bulb moments.

Look for that moment where a customer has an aha. Or a customer goes, oh, my goodness, you just told me something that's going to Suddenly save me 25 hours of work, or you've taught me something that is going to change the way my business works. Those are those light bulb moments. Two things you get to take away from them is you get to realize what you're doing is impactful, which is always, you know, from a.

From a.

From a selfish perspective, a really cool moment. But two, you also get to realize that you have sort of a greater purpose in this than just delivering feature and product training, and you've helped a customer feel successful. The key with that is not to just go, I did it. It's to learn how to quantify them and to learn how to duplicate those over time. And so when those light bulb moments occur, I encourage my team, like, write those down, put them in Salesforce, because, you know, if it is in Salesforce, it doesn't exist. Put them in Salesforce and let's figure.

Out if there's trends.

Figure out what. What is it that you're doing that's creating those light bulb moments? Because if you get more of those, customers are going to come back to you, not just from a retention perspective, but they're going to raise their hand.

And say, I want this person to do my next training.

I'm looking forward to the next training. We have a Slack channel. That is the sort of the kudos.

That my team gets from customers.

And the ones that really stand out to me are the ones that say, I can't wait for the next training. I mean, who says that? I'm. I'm a trainer, and even I'm like.

When somebody tells me I have to.

Go to mandatory training, I just sort.

Of put my head down.

And so when a customer says, I can't wait to go to that next training, that's when I know we've been successful.

That's.

Those are the moments that we have.

To quantify and repeat and repeat and.

Repeat, because that's going to get us closer to that solid line from onboarding and education to retention.

Boom. Mic drop moment. I don't think we can end on a higher note than that, Honestly, Kerry, I think we're good, man. Yeah. Okay. Thomas Stutter, Vice president of customer onboarding implementations. It has been a phenomenal, phenomenal episode with a ton of nuggets. We're going to have to splice this thing up into 15 videos because it's so good. Thank you so much for being here.

It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for hosting me.

Of course. And you guys are listening to the Counter Experience podcast and we'll talk to you all soon.