The New Age of Customer Education and the Flywheel | INBOUND 2023

We are going to spend the next 45 minutes talking about customer education. So we have a few things we're going to go through today, which is we're going to do a quick hello and welcome. Want to make sure we know each other a little bit as we go through this content. And then we're going to talk about this new age of customer education, sort of what's changed in the last couple of years when it's come to how we think about customer education, what it means for our organizations, and also what it means for our business success. What can we do with it, what's important? And then we're going to talk about the transformation that's happened. There's going to be three key things that we go through in here, and no surprise, we're going to talk about AI and we're going to talk about what that transformation means for you, what it means for your organization, and what it means for how you can continue to use customer education to grow your business, whether you're just getting started, whether you have an established program, or whether you're like, I just kind of want to see what this could mean for me. We're then going to do some tips and tricks. I'm going to put like 60 seconds on the clock, and we're going to go through some really quick things here on what it means for headcount, budget and growing community, because we can talk all day about the importance of customer education. You still need to fund it for your business. You still need to be able to put resources to it. You still need people to engage with that community. And then we're going to talk about where we go from here, which is we're going to spend a lot of time today learning and growing together. But. But your learning journey isn't gonna stop when you leave this room. So what can you do as you leave, as you leave inbound and you take those takeaways back to your business? We're gonna do a quick hello and welcome. I've been talking to you for a few minutes here, but my name is Courtney Sembler, and I'm the director of HubSpot Academy. I've been at HubSpot for over eight years now, and I've seen the very good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to growing and scaling customer education programs. Prior to my role at HubSpot, I saw a very different side of customer ed. I was in the environmental nonprofit space, and I educated donors on why they should give us money for conservation work. Customer education can be used in so many facets. And that's what we're going to talk about today. And as we go through our presentation today, there's three key takeaways which the first and foremost is customer education is a growth lever. It's something we've talked about for the last couple of years and we're going to continue to do so and it's important for your businesses. The second, we're going to talk about how to utilize AI to, to create content smarter for you, for your teams, particularly if you're a smaller team. We're also going to talk about knowing your business objectives. When it comes to customer education, the most important thing is how does it tie back to your business objectives? How is it helping your business's bottom line? We all know that learning's great. We all know that it's important. That's why we're all here today. You're at inbound to learn, but your businesses need to know, well, what is it helping me to do? So you're going to see business objectives come up quite a bit. You're actually going to see a nice little orange star in the top right corner of those slides, letting you know that we're going to talk about business objectives here. Before we get too much further though, I do want to introduce you to HubSpot Academy. We are the learning resource for HubSpot. We educate and inspire in marketing, sales, service, AI, the HubSpot software and a lot of other things. We've been around since 2012 and we've built what you see up here, which is the HubSpot Academy app. It is a homegrown learning management system and here at HubSpot. And the point of why HubSpot Academy is so important for HubSpot is because it helps our business objectives. Things like retention and usage, which we're gonna talk a little bit about. And HubSpot Academy has a purpose, which is to empower a global learning community through inbound experiences and credentials so that we together maximize career potential and accelerate organizational success. But the idea with our purpose is tying that value of learning. I'm gonna help you learn, I'm gonna help you grow your career. But why does that matter to HubSpot? Well, it's because those learners who are going through that content, our customers, our partners, our developers, are then retaining longer inside of HubSpot. They're using more HubSpot, they're getting more value from it, which is important to HubSpot's business, which is what we're going to talk about. Today, a quick look at what HubSpot Academy is by the numbers is we have over half a million actively certified users, we have over 600 learning assets and we're available in six different languages. And, and so when we look at some of these numbers, this is why it's important to HubSpot and why it can be important to your organizations as well, which is HubSpot Academy drives adoption. We're able to help the career potential for HubSpot customers and partners as well as developers. And we scale HubSpot's capabilities up market. We're able to accredit our partners to deliver services on behalf of HubSpot. We're able to have actively certified professionals who are getting jobs, who know HubSpot, bringing HubSpot to their organizations, which is gonna be our focus today. How do you take this example, what customer education looks like for HubSpot Academy and apply it to your business, to your organization? What can you do with it? And how can you leverage this new age that we're in to grow your business so, this new age of customer education, because over the last couple of years we've seen this trend. Customer education has been talked about not just at inbound, but other events, other conferences. It keeps coming up in research reports, which is, well, how do we retain customers long term? We educate them. How do we help attract new people to our business? We provide education. It keeps coming up in businesses big and small. This trend is real and one of the important elements of it and the core is it helps customers. That's what it all comes back to when we think about customer education. There's a lot of implications, there's a lot of different ways to use it. But businesses care because it's helping customers get the most of their product or their service. And so why does that matter to us when we say that? Well, customer education, customers are getting help. What are some of those bottom line objectives that it's serving? Well, it helps us with retention. Customers who use customer education often retain longer in your product or your service. You can help with onboarding, you're able to automate that for your customers, give them the customer education they need to get onto your platform faster. It helps with product adoption, getting them set up for success, using, giving them examples, showing them what it looks like if they used your product and revenue. When we have customers that are retaining longer, they're using more of our products, it's driving more revenue for our teams and for our business. And so when we think about that, customer education is this full Flywheel. It helps with all three phases. Delight, engage and attract. I go in reverse order here. Because customer education has often just been talked about in this delight stage, it plays that crucial role in driving engagement and success in the post sale experience from onboarding and beyond. But a lot of what this transformation in this new age is, is about these other stages. How are you using it across the customer journey? So when we talk about engage and engaging our customers and potential customers with customer education, we talk a lot about that increasing product adoption, particularly in the sales process as well, being able to attract those essential customers when we think about bringing them on with customer education. So when we look back and we look back at yesterday, not necessarily yesterday in the formal, but yesterday in general, customer education was really focused on the post sale experience. It was really about getting onboarded. That ever boarding experience, it provided ongoing support and that on demand support for low cost. So one of the initial reasons customer education became so important in businesses, both B2C and B2C B2B which was it had that low cost way to support customers. And the main metric for that was completion. We talked a lot about well, did they complete the training? When we talked about the success of customer education was like completion, completion. We talked a lot about that. And while this isn't a picture of me directly, this is often how I felt, which is it made it really difficult to showcase impact because imagine yourself, you're sitting there with your CEO or the founder of your company and they're like, why should we continue to invest in customer education? And your answer is, well, once someone's onboarded, they complete training and the conversation ends there. There's no of that business objective of well, when they completed the training, they did this and this and this is what we're seeing. And so in this new age, because customer education is being disrupted, we're starting to focus on this end to end element of the customer journey. It's not just about the onboarding experience, it's not just about getting them in the door. It's about making sure they have education throughout their experience. They build trust with you, they're able to continue to learn over time. It also has efficiencies. The more content we have, the more we can create and, and disrupt ourselves by providing more education in different formats. We're gonna talk a little bit about that. We're also starting to see this human approach to developing customer education with AI which is that also helps with that efficiency piece and it's also about aligning those internal teams. This disruption that's happening is not just about how your customer support thinks about customer education. It's about your product team, about your sales team, but about your marketing team all seeing customer education as this growth lever. So in the future, when we think about where customer education is now going, which is with AI, we can start to scale our customer education program. I know that some of you in this audience right now have struggled with this because so have I. I've gone to the founders of my company and I work for HubSpot and been like, we need more resources. There's someone sitting over to the left who just joined our team and we've been asking for those resources for so long. We, with AI, we can start to scale those programs to support more business objectives and we can engage at each stage of that organizational flywheel. So we're seeing that full customer journey come together. And essentially that does mean that we can serve more learners globally, which is what we're all here to do with our programs. So now that we kind of get a sense of what this new age is, this disruption that's happened, we're not just focused on delight, we're not just focused on the onboarding experience. Let's talk about the transformation that's happened and how you can use these things to continue to transform either your growing customer education program or the one you already have. So there's going to be three key pieces here that we're going to dive into, which is when we talk about the transformation of customer ed, it's focusing on developing the skills and competencies that align with your business objectives. And this is the point where we bring the learner's perspective into our company's perspective. How do we make sure that those are puzzle pieces that fit together? Diversifying our programs, You've probably seen a lot of different formats of content this week. You've seen presentations like this. You may have listened to some podcasts on the floor. You might have connected with someone one to one. We want to think about how we're diversifying the education that we're providing and the different formats that we can put it in. And then of course, leveraging AI, this is an efficiency tool. This is going to help us move faster together and also freeing up time for our teams or even ourselves. If you're a one person customer ed team to work in on the things that you want to that you know are going to drive more business growth, essentially we're climbing a mountain together. There are three stages that we need to get to. Three little camps that we need to grow and they connect. Each one of them requires the other to be efficient together. When we talk about skills and competencies, it's that foundational piece, it's the learning and development piece that we talk about in customer ed. It's not just about marketing collateral, it's about, not just about getting a message out there, it's making sure your learner can take away something from the experience and they're able to apply it to their career, to using your product, to using your service. We're diversifying that education. That's going to mean that all learners of all types and different languages can also engage. But also you're spreading that customer education across your business. That internal team alignment, it's going to be in your knowledge base, it's going to be on demand, it's going to be on YouTube, it's going to be a lot of elements that you can pull there. And last, of course, that last step that we're getting to is that leveraging of AI, making sure that in this new age we're bringing in efficiencies for our team so we can continue to grow effectively without necessarily investing in more headcount always. Which is a thing that all of us continue to struggle with when there's so many things that we need to do. Right. All right, let's talk about skills and competence. When we think about skills and competencies, I want to start us off with a few definitions because I know we're all coming from different backgrounds. So what does it mean when I say competency? Well, competencies are the knowledge, the skills, the abilities, the behaviors that contribute to individual and organizational performance. This can be things like making business decisions, communication, leadership. These are competencies that we are all deploying in certain areas and that we're potentially teaching to our learners. And we marry competencies with skills. These are the learned and applied abilities and that use one's knowledge effectively in execution or performance. Those are things like active listening, copy editing, delivering feedback. These are skills that we use with our competencies to be able to deploy those effectively. And last but certainly not least, our first orange star here, which is business objective. The results you are aiming to achieve in order to accomplish your longer term company vision. These are going to be the things that are your bottom line retention, product usage, services usage, depending on what you are in business for. And we think about these three things coming together. The transformation that we're seeing is that we want them to all fit together like puzzle pieces, which is you need to first define what your Business objective is what are you trying to achieve? Is it product usage, is it retention, is it content leads? What are you trying to do with your customer education program? And then asking the second question, which is, what are the skills associated with that bottom line that I need to teach to my learner? If it's about product usage, what do they need to know about the product? What do they need to be able to do to be successful in the product? And then the last is we connect that to competencies. And the reason connecting it to competencies is important is this is the part where the individual that you're teaching, the company that you're teaching is inspired. They're able to take that back for themselves and use that to grow their career. Not just use your product more, but be able to efficiently and effectively use your product, your service, to grow their bottom line. And this is where all of these elements come together, which is why now, when we talk about growing and moving up this mountain, we start here because if we don't have these puzzle pieces, you can leverage AI, you can do all sorts of things, but this is the connecting piece that's going to make all of that more successful. And so what I challenge each of you to think about as you leave here is what are those business objectives? They can be simple, they don't need to be complicated. Think about what's the core thing that you want to be able to achieve. Start to connect it, associate it with the skills and competencies for your learners. Which brings me to diversified education, which is once we have our business objectives, we know the skills and competencies that we need to connect and associate. We can start to talk about what are the different ways that we can leverage formats and different types of education to achieve this. But I want to start with a caveat before I talk about diversified education. This is a common quote, you may have seen it in a lot of different presentations, which is, startups don't starve, they drown. We can't do everything. Diversified education doesn't mean that you do credentials, learning paths, knowledge based articles, blogs. It doesn't mean you do everything, it means you stay focused. Because when we think about diversifying our program, we have to be realistic on what we can take on and what we can't. And so our customer education programs often fall into this category. Let's see if any of this resonates with you. Can your team just create this one video for our product page? We can just create a new enablement team to develop that content. Right. Just have a salesperson Create that video. Do we have a training on this? If not, can we make one for next week? This happens a lot to customer education teams every day. Because we're great at what we do. People in our company want us to help them. That is an awesome thing. Don't let your teams forget that when people reach out to you, they want you to create stuff that's good. The problem is it doesn't allow us to focus. We end up with all these different doors that we walk through and it's not strategic, it's not planned. We can't move forward together. And so when we think about diversifying education, it's taking this sort of, okay, we do a product video over here, we kind of help over here. It starts to streamline it for your team. It also enables your team to say, no. So when the people come to you and say, oh, can we just do this really quick? You're like, actually, no. That doesn't fit into our strategy. Becomes a powerful way for you to stay focused and also to get your teams excited about moving forward, not just running through these doors because we were asked to. This is why diversified education is important. As we think about three key things here, which is business objectives. Again, our nice little star here, which is the core focus areas and your goals for your team, all comes back to that. We're going to keep resonating on that. It also looks at breadth and depth, which is what are the kind of full shape of that T shape of your learners, what's the breadth and the depth that they need about your product or your service that you need to be able to support for HubSpot Academy, what we talk a lot about, which is we have a lot of hubs and so we think about what do our learners need, what do our customers need along that top of that T shape, what are the core elements of each hub they need to know? And then what's that depth? And that looks at different types of educational content. That's where the knowledge base comes in and our blog and our videos on YouTube, et cetera. And then the most important piece with diversified education is it does not mean you create something net new every time it's on a new resource, a new platform. Reusing and refocusing some of the content across your ecosystem is what's going to make this really effective for your team. So let's first talk about business objectives, which is you want to align your internal teams on your core objectives. Not just your team, but the teams that might be reaching out to you. So this is where you go to your product team, your sales team, the rest of your marketing team. Wherever you sit in the business, you say, this is what we're focused on. So when they inevitably do ask you for a video and they inevitably need a training from you, you're able to go back and say, okay, where does this fit in with our business objectives? And it becomes much more of a conversation versus we don't want to do that. The second is that clarity in how your initiatives support the company. Are going to create more specific asks, more tailored asks. When you need to be able to go and create training for a team, it's going to come with that. Well, this is actually going to drive usage and then it enables you to prioritize the educational content for those specific goals. If you have a small one or two person team, this is important because you can't do everything, but also as a larger team, this is important. HubSpot Academy is over 45 people now and if we just said, oh yeah, we'll do whatever, there's going to be no cohesion on what that education looks like. Prioritization is really important here. And then when we think about the breadth and depth, there's three elements that I like to bring in. The breadth can be a lot of that. Amplifying your core message. For HubSpot Academy, this is the inbound methodology since 2012. The breadth that we've included is in every piece of content, whether it's small software or not. We talk about that common framework, we amplify that core message across the top of that T shape so that our learners are able to connect that message to whatever we're teaching them. The second piece is when we start to talk about that depth, we start to unlock new audiences. We start to think about, well, who's the learner? Maybe they're a student, maybe they're a marketing professional or a sales rep. We start to think about that depth. How do we go down and, and unlock new audiences for our company? And then it enables us to do both of these things, which is support new and existing customers. It's not just about the folks that are coming in. This breadth and depth allows us to carry those customers on their journey. Once they've been successful with our product and service, where do they go from here? Answering that question and the reuse, reduce, recycle. I like to think about this a lot. We talk about this in the environmental space, but it really contributes well to our flywheel because we can use content, reuse it across these different Elements, which it's not just about creating one piece of content and only using it to attract. Can you also use that to delight folks? Maybe it's a different format, but thinking about how you can repurpose these things, a lot of the way that can look is you can add it to your knowledge base. This is an example from HubSpot's knowledge base where we mention a HubSpot Academy video. It can be on YouTube. Taking a similar piece of content, maybe a shorter piece of that video content and Putting it on YouTube can also mean creating on demand content, things that go directly into your customer education portal wherever you're hosting that content. It can also mean adding on and creating credentials. Now these are all examples from HubSpot Academy today about where our customer education serves across HubSpot's flywheel. This can look different for you, but I encourage you to start here. Where can you add it to your knowledge base, your blog, some of that text based content? Where can you add it into YouTube, TikTok, all the different platforms that we're using today and reusing that on demand content in multiple different formats. And the last piece here that we're going to talk about is leveraging AI, because you might be thinking that's a lot of work, Courtney. How do I do that? How do I get summaries? How do I get these things on these different formats? This is where AI is going to come in and help us power all of this. Because it's not going to be you in a room separating out scripts. You're going to get support here so that you can continue to focus on new business objectives that you want to take on so that your business can continue to grow. So we're going to climb the rest of this mountain here. We're going to do our favorite thing at Inbound and we're going to talk about AI. Leveraging AI in a content creation process has been a little nerve wracking. I've seen it, I felt it. We start talking about all these great content creators that we have and we're like, well, AI can do that. What does that mean for them? What does it mean for us? We're customer education professionals. We know that the success of education comes from being human, connecting one to one. AI can't do that. So how are we going to leverage AI in the customer education process? Well, the way that I'm thinking about it, the way that I'm going to invite all of you to think about it, is in three areas. Localization, content assist and focusing our Human efforts. You might not be doing localization today and you might not have it on your roadmap, but it's still an important thing to keep in mind, which is as our businesses get more and more global, as our world gets more global and we're working with more learners and audiences and trying to get our products and service adopted across the globe, localization is an important factor of that. So if it's not where you are today, that's okay. But here's some elements that are really important when it comes to AI. So AI has been around in the localization space for a long time. It's actually this concept of machine translation, which is using automated software or algorithms to translate speech or text from one language to another. It's the most common form of localization. I take this slide deck, I send it to the localization team, and they send it back to me in Spanish. They're not changing the message, they're not changing anything for regional context. It's just localized, which is good. It's a good starting point. In AI and in machine translation, this is what they do really well. It's actually what we use for HubSpot Academy when we start to localize our content. And the reason why that's important in the localization space is localization and language translation helps us do this faster. We're not having a human take this slide deck and moving it from English to Spanish. We're getting some support in doing that. And customer support can be used in this way as well. With chatbots answering questions in native languages. Again, using machine translation to get common questions answered faster doesn't require a human. It's allowing us to move in a direction of supporting more languages with not necessarily adding more headcount. And then the last piece, and this is where it gets into that focusing our human efforts is some of our content needs cultural adaptations. It needs to be customized to a different market, a different learner, and with AI, and we have faster translation that's happening, we're able to focus our content creators on creating cultural, specific and relative messages. And AI can help us also evaluate what those learners need going through and seeing where it's resonating and where it's not. This is what HubSpot Academy is doing today for our localization efforts. We're thinking about where can we localize where we can provide native content to make sure we're reaching all those global learners. And this enables us to do the key part with leveraging AI in our content creation process, which is working smarter not harder. And with Content Assist, and you may have seen some examples of what this looks like in HubSpot. There's a lot of different ways to do this. This, of course, comes from HubSpot. It comes from our blog tool, which is allowing you to generate ideas and summaries using Content Assist. And it can insert paragraphs, it can do a lot, create outlines, etc. And what this helps is it supports creativity, it generates those summaries, it's getting content out to your learners faster. And what I love about this, and we've been piloting this as our Academy team with our inbound professors, which is oftentimes we have these big ideas of what we want to educate our learners on. I started this presentation with I want to get three key things across. Customer education is still important. Leverage AI and know your business objectives. And I use some AI tools to create some summaries for myself, start to get those wheels turning. It doesn't mean that AI generated this entire deck, but it did mean that I had a starting point. And particularly for our content creators today, there's a lot going on. There's a lot of things that we need to focus on. Being able to have a starting point to move forward on something is helpful. And with this, we can develop native content as well. So one of the things that we see as a challenge when we start to go into other languages is that we may have one or two and native content creators on our team. They don't have a full team of content editors or developers to help them develop these learning experiences. With Content Assist, they can get feedback in real time. They can get some of those pieces that they might not necessarily get otherwise, and it creates those personalized experiences. Now, before I wrap up on AI and some of the ways that you can leverage it, I'm going to put this up here because it is important. There is a lot to do. There's so much to do in our world today that focusing our human efforts, leveraging AI in the content development process allows us to do this. It allows us to be creative. It allows to go out and find new formats of education and still keep going with the foundational elements. And it's important for us because as content creators, as customer education professionals, we want to make sure that we are moving our programs forward, not keeping them stagnant where they are today. So if there's one thing that you can take away from leveraging AI, it's thinking about where do you want to have efficiency in your processes? Maybe it's in content Editing, Maybe it's in that development of how does this concept support this business objective? Start to utilize it to see some of those comparisons and get started. We're going to do our tips and tricks section because we've gone through quite a bit. The first up is budget, which is this is a template that I providing in the resources after this section. You can, you can see the example here. But what it allows you to do is we have limited budget for our customer education resources. That's true for a lot of what we do. This template helps you understand where you need to put your money to help grow your team. So what it looks like as you have the team, the software, the contract resources and events, you might not have events, you can cut that off and it's able to give you a starting point for what are you trying to do, who needs to be involved and what's that estimated revenue influence. And this gives you a really good sense of where some of these touch points are. The second piece that's really helpful here is it also enables you to look at internal teams that you can support with resourcing. This is how I think about planning budget for the HubSpot Academy team. But this template really allows you to look at where you have the revenue that you need to grow your team. Whether that's headcount wise, whether that's getting resourcing for software, whether that's working with your product team to make investments in how your customer education is embedded in the product. All of it's really important. This template's really important. I will share. This link goes out into a larger spreadsheet that enables you to do some of this planning together with your team. The second piece of this is planning for headcount. Looking at your team, what does it look like the business objectives again come back, which is what are you gonna be focused on? Is it onboarding? Is it product training, is it attracting new users? It's attracting engaging, delighting customers, developing a credential program, whatever it may be, your headcount is going to be dependent on these things because where do you need people to go? The way that I think about HubSpot Academy and the way our team is structured is in this triangle. The way I think about it though is if we are going to try to create education, so that's that education pillar in the bottom right. We also need a way to operate. We have to have systems and processes where we have to develop frameworks to move content faster. We have to have AI in our educational processes. And last we need to market it, because having great education is pretty worthless if it doesn't make it to the right person at the right time. And so when I think about the business objectives, I bring in that triangle, which is, if we're thinking about onboarding, what do we need to market onboarding, what education needs to be created, what are the systems and processes and that need to be developed to support that. So when you think about planning your headcount for your team, even if it's one person, even if it's a half a person, in each of these pieces, it's gonna allow you to look at what you need most and be able to bring that back to your business. With the headcount, ask with the budget in mind. Last piece is growing your community, educating and inspiring. When we think about customer education, we think about growing a community or. One of the things that I love Most about the HubSpot Academy community is that these two words resonate really well. We educate and we inspire. It's not just telling you where to click into the product, it's about getting you excited about how that product can be leveraged to grow your business. So when you think about bringing a community together for your learners, whoever they may be, your customers, potential customers, think about how these two things can come together. How are you educating them, but also how are you inspiring them? This comes out in a few different ways, whether it's a methodology that you're teaching, whether it's a concept that you're hoping that they get excited about, or it's a branding, a messaging that you want to bring to them in your education. The way this has looked for HubSpot Academy is bringing the inbound methodology into a lot of our content, reminding folks that it's not just about what you're trying to do, but it's how you're going to do it, why you're going to do it. In a lot of HubSpot Academy education, you see a framework that is why. How what? Why does it matter? How does it look? What are you going to do with it? And that enables not just the education piece, but the inspiration piece. When we talk about where we go from here, there's a few things that I want to bring your attention to, which is, if you're unfamiliar with HubSpot Academy, take a look. But there's also a lot of resources that we have that can get you moving forward from here on this learning journey. If you're excited about Learning more about HubSpot, we've got HubSpot Academy Bootcamp World Certification Week. If you're a partner, we've got partner credentials, we got certifications, we got learning paths. And the reason I point you to all these different resources is that these are great examples of different ways, ways that you can educate your customers, take them, learn from them, bring them into your programs. If you want to run boot camps, talk to us about it. If you want to be a part of a bootcamp, come and talk to us about it. If you haven't talked to any of the Academy folks yet, please do so. The other piece, of course, is Connect with Me. This link will take you directly to my LinkedIn. Please connect with me there. I would love to chat with you afterwards. I'm also going to be posting the slides from this presentation there in the next hour, so you can access them there, as well as some of the resources and templates that I mentioned. As a quick summary for where we've been, we talked about that new age of customer education, the transformation that's happened, some of those tips and tricks for your budget and where we're gonna go from here together. And last but certainly not least, those three takeaways that customer education is still a growth lever for your business. Start to utilize AI to do content smarter, not harder. And lastly, know your business objectives. There's one thing you're going to leave here with. Know your business objectives. What are you doing? Why are you doing it? And being able to tie that to all the education that you're developing for your learners over time and to help your organizational growth and success and of course, grow better.