Written by: Bill Cushard
Having a solid customer education strategy is vital for a company’s success. It is very rewarding to help a team feel confident that they know where they are going and how they will make a valuable contribution to their organization.
That is the value of strategic planning. And even if plans change, which they will, these teams know how to handle it because they went through the process of figuring it out beforehand. According to Harvard Business Review, leaders should think of a strategic plan as a “guidance tool” and a "work in progress.” The plan itself becomes a tool for adapting.
Most of us can relate to the value of planning. The problem is that we don't necessarily know what the strategy design process looks like. Below is a process for designing your customer education strategy.
The first step is to analyze your customer journey and identify touch points where education might play a role in solving the problem. Maybe your sales team is explaining the same thing to prospects over and over. If only prospects knew certain concepts, the sales process would be much better. Many software companies offer education to prospects to help increase pipeline velocity and create leads. This is just one example where customer education could play a valuable role beyond product training after the sale.
Once pain points are identified, start setting goals for alleviating those pain points. Once a major goal is identified, an education team can start putting a roadmap together and that roadmap could go in into years three to five providing clarity over the long term.
Once you have goals, you need to define concrete KPIs. The KPIs have to be defined concretely so that you can actually run a report on them. For example, you cannot have a goal to increase product adoption by 25% and define that as "customers using the product more."
Don't be vague. Be very specific. And pick a KPI that you know you can measure today. Otherwise, you will never get to it.
Simply put. Go get your buy-in and start executing. There is no substitute for action.
You can go through this process yourself. Gather your team and walk through these steps. But don’t wait. While you sit on the sidelines thinking about it, your competition is designing their customer education strategy.
Get ahead of your competitors and reach out to us today.
Originally published on July 23, 2018
