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Customer success is critical for business success — and post-sales training is a cornerstone of customer enablement.
It helps ensure that your customers get the most value out of your software, all while cultivating greater loyalty.
This article addresses best practices you can apply to develop post-sales training that truly resonates with your audience.
Key Takeaways
- Post-sales training exists at the intersection of sales and customer success.
- Collaboration and communication between departments is essential for effectiveness.
- Hands-on learning and comprehensive materials are invaluable.
- The focus should always be on the customer and their needs.
5 Tips for Better Post-Sales Education
If you’re reading this, you probably understand at least some of the basics around post-sales education. So you don’t need surface-level advice about training experiences and technology.
Instead, the focus from here on will be on how you can avoid a few of the most common post-sales training mistakes.
Eliminate Communication Silos
Collaboration between your sales team and customer success team is essential for effective post-sales training. But what about marketing and customer support? What about your developers and UX designers?
For your training to be effective, you need to involve all stakeholders in its development. Ensure there’s a way for everyone to collaboratively share information about potential bottlenecks, pain points, and opportunities.
Segment Your Customers
To ensure your post-sales training meets everyone’s needs, segment your customers by industry, use case, role, and experience level. You may also consider segmenting them based on the products, services, or features they use most frequently.
Connect Everything Together
One of the most significant — and most frequent — mistakes businesses make with post-sales training is managing it in isolation. Customer enablement should not occur in a vacuum. Instead, training should be part of an ecosystem that includes pre-sale, onboarding, and post-sale education.
That training should be embedded at every touchpoint in the customer journey, and accessible to anyone who’s interested at any time.
Maintain an Up-To-Date Knowledge Base
While hands-on training remains the most effective way to learn, you should still provide customers with a publicly accessible, searchable encyclopedia of product features and information. After all, sometimes, you don’t need practice, but simply want to look something up.
Ask Your Customers What They Want to Learn
Lastly, if you’re struggling to figure out what sort of education to deliver to your customers, ask them! Send out regular surveys to find out what knowledge, skills, or expertise people want to develop, and use their responses to guide your training strategy.
Build Momentum from Sales to Success Handoff
Great training doesn’t stop at onboarding — it evolves with your customer. By applying the right post-sales strategies, you don’t just educate users; you empower them to achieve more with your product, stay engaged longer, and grow alongside your business.
If you’re ready to take that next step, start by zooming out. Look at how customer education fits into your broader success strategy. When your teams, tools, and training efforts are aligned, post-sales enablement becomes a continuous value driver — not a one-off event.
Check out the following resources:
- The Importance of Bringing Together Customer Success and Customer Education
- The Ultimate Guide to Customer Training
- From Silo to System: Real Stories of Post-Sale Learning that Works Everywhere
From there, book a demo and we’ll show you why CloudShare is the perfect solution for customer onboarding, enablement, and more.
FAQs
What is post-sales training, and why is it important?
Post-sales training provides customers with the knowledge, skills, and proficiencies they need to fully realize the value of your software. It goes beyond basic onboarding to enabling full mastery of advanced functionality, providing guidance on best practices, and introducing new features. An effective post-sales training program encourages long-term loyalty, increasing product adoption and customer satisfaction.
How does post-sales training support customer success teams?
With an effective post-sales training program in place, customer success teams can spend less time on reactive support and more time proactively strengthening their company’s relationship with its customers. And of course, well-trained customers are much more likely to be amenable to upselling and cross-selling.
What are the key components of an effective post-sales education strategy?
For post-sales training to be as effective as possible, it should include:
- Content tailored to different customer personas and further personalized through adaptive learning
- Opportunities for ongoing skill development
- Feedback loops between customers, instructional designers, and customer success teams
- Comprehensive analytics that allow a business to track the training’s effectiveness
- Support for on-demand learning, particularly for feature updates
- A strategy that evolves alongside the product and customer
How can virtual labs improve post-sales training engagement?
Virtual labs allow your team to easily create immersive, hands-on experiences that let customers actively apply what they’ve learned about your software. They can practice, experiment, and troubleshoot in what is, to all intents and purposes, a real-world setting. It’s far more engaging than sitting through a slide deck or reading a brochure.
How should you measure the success of your post-sales training program?
You should consider using both qualitative and quantitative customer education metrics. Doing so will give you a more complete picture of your training while also allowing you to identify potential problems.
