Customer Education Blog

Last year Gainsight reorganized their post-sales teams to increase customer success. They wanted to put customer success first and designed their organization around customer needs. This included moving their training team to the "front" of the customer funnel, giving them more access to both customer feedback and product development. Gainsight already had a training team set up, but by including them in their customer success department, they were able to infuse the training team with customer success principles, setting them up for greater success down the road.

Danielle Tomlinson knows a thing or two about building a customer education team. She's successfully lead customer education teams at SAP and Redhat and has now built the education services team at Hortonworks from scratch.

Because she's so passionate and interested in customer education, Danielle's dedicated a lot of time and effort into building the best customer education strategy—and team—at Hortonworks. She's seen first-hand the impact of education programs on a company's bottom line and knows how to build a successful customer education team.

In this post, we'll share some of Danielle's ideas on how to build a customer education dream team, including information on the roles and skills you need in your team, as well as the importance of internal collaboration with other teams in your company, like sales and marketing.

Customer education plays a crucial role in Customer Success. Training metrics can be a powerful driver of business outcomes because they can be used by and influence all departments in your organization: customer success, sales, marketing, finance, professional services, support, and more.

Training metrics show that the investment your company has made in training results in outcomes that make the activity worthwhile. Whether that's a clear line to revenue or increased website traffic or a more engaged customer community, training metrics show the impact to the entire company.

Signups, attendance, and webinar views. Those are just some of the traditional data points learning professionals use to measure their training programs. But what about other business KPIs that are impacted by training? These data points reveal the true effectiveness of your training better than any feedback survey. You may recognize some of them from your manager's quarterly reports, but hadn't thought of how training affects it. You may be surprised.