A few months ago, I met with a VP of Customer Success for software company in the (broadly speaking) DevOps space about his company's training needs. This company has a flagship product that has gained a lot of traction and they have several new products. Since it has been around for a few years, their flagship product has a fairly mature training program that customers take regularly, but their new products do not have any training beyond the ad hoc, reactive training that services consultants deliver when asked for it.
The VP of Customer Success started talking with us because his organization has a need to speed up the development of training programs for their new products. They can do it themselves. They have an experienced and skilled training organization. But they cannot do it and handle existing projects in the time frame they want. They have plans to build up their training team, but that takes time, and this company wants to move quickly.
In explaining to me why speed is such a factor, this VP of Customer Success said to me: “Bill, I have 9 customers who would be $1 million dollar accounts if only we had training (on our new products)."
I said, “How do you know that?"
He said, “Because they told me. Each one.”
Whoa.
I do not need a Forrester Report or a Gartner Magic Quadrant to know that training is valuable or that our customers come to us because they know training is important or that large enterprise customers very often require training for just about any software implementation.
All I need is a smart customer who has their own customers expressing, in no uncertain terms, that they need training or that they cannot move forward with larger deals unless they get training. Enterprise customers like this realize the critical importance that training is to their success and their customers' success.
I cannot think of anything else that more clearly communicates the value of training to customer success.
Call for Comments
- Do you have customers who you think would buy more of your products and services if only they had more (any) training from you?
- How do your customers rely on training to get the most out of your software?
