During the live version of our recent webinar with Culture Amp’s Senior Customer Education Program Manager, Bailey Edgell, we received a number of questions that we wanted to share more broadly. We followed up with Bailey for her thoughts below.
(If you missed the webinar, you can view it on-demand here or check out our recap on the Skilljar blog.)
Question: Do Culture Amp’s Sales and Marketing Teams view training as a tool for prospects since you are teaching not only product knowledge, but also industry information?
Bailey: While Culture Amp Training is currently only available to customers, we have a strong partnership with our Product Marketing and Sales Enablement teams, and we work together to ensure that what we promise to our prospects, we deliver to our customers. For example, our Marketing team recently put together an eBook to help prospects understand the different approaches to performance management that are possible with Culture Amp. We use the content from the eBook in our Performance Overview course to help customers begin designing their own approach. Prospects can trust that what they learn about our philosophy during the sales process, our content in Skilljar will help them apply at their organizations, both as they use our product and outside of the platform.
Question: At what point in building your learning program did you begin to do things like sales enablement and higher-level thought leadership? Did you wait until all of the ‘where to click’ type of training was built? In other words, how did you approach prioritizing initiatives while creating content?
Bailey: Our first priority was to create on-demand versions of our live training sessions to begin offering that self-service education experience that was our initial impetus for using Skilljar. The Performance Diagnostic survey and expansion campaign opportunity came up about halfway through that content creation process, and seemed like a great way for us to experiment with initiatives beyond our standard content. This first experiment taught us a lot about how to integrate education into a campaign and paved the way for a deeper partnership with Customer Marketing.
We were able to prioritize these initiatives while creating content because early on, my teammate Fresia designed a relatively lightweight way for us to guide other individuals in the company (like Customer Success and People Science folks) to create courses. The Performance Diagnostic course was mostly created by a People Scientist outside our team, with us giving input and feedback along the way. This let us stay focused on our own content roadmap but keep new, exciting initiatives moving forward.
Question: In terms of how Customer Education and Marketing Teams work together, how did you get everyone on the same page and working in the same direction?
Bailey: When we purchased Skilljar, we knew we wanted to use it to share product updates with customers. The product updates process was owned by Product Marketing, so that partnership was a bit baked into the implementation process. Our first product updates course came out in early Q3 (soon after launch), and we did a retrospective soon after to identify what each team’s desired outcomes were, how we did, and how we could improve our process. Capping off our first partnership this way helped us get aligned, and we continue to retro our campaigns together to stay aligned.
Question: How did you go about connecting Skilljar and Salesforce and determining how it training impacts customer health?
Bailey: We bring product utilization data into Salesforce from our platform to create a customer health score, so we were able to use these fields as inspiration for bringing Skilljar data into Salesforce. We chose to use a data connector to convert raw Skilljar data into a small number of custom fields at the account level in Salesforce, like the number of users who have used Skilljar from that account in the last 90 days and lifetime registrations from that account. We can then aggregate this account-level data to look at trends for our entire book of business.
We partnered with our Ops team to examine correlations between these fields and overall customer health, primarily via account mood and renewal. 56% of customers who renew have taken a course in Skilljar, whereas only 11% of customers who do not renew have taken a course.
